Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines has been out for a while now, and I've been having a lot of fun playing the game. It's basically almost everything you wanted the Sim City franchise to be, and it's much more addicting than any previous Sim City game.

My favorite part of Cities: Skylines is how you can turn the game into a sandbox for whatever your creativity comes up with. The game allows the build of custom assets so that you can supplement the stock assets the game provides. Additionally, the game allows for modding, allowing for amazing user-generated content. If you can imagine it and build the mod, it's available for your use. For example, the Traffic++ mod can be used to create bus lanes in the road and can restrict turns at intersections for better traffic control. One of the built-in mods allows for infinite money so that you can be completely free to do whatever your heart desires without having to make your city viable at all.

Cities: Skylines also improves upon a lot of other things that were wrong with Sim City. When you start building the city, it becomes very evident that the Cities: Skylines road-building tool is much better, allowing for customized curved roads, and roads at different heights (and trying to create crazy interchanges as a result). In addition, the engine itself for Cities: Skylines would simulate every individual and assign them to jobs at specific locations and to specific residences, instead of the nearest location. The traffic simulation is also much better, with Cities: Skylines providing a detailed simulation, leading to emergent puzzles where players will have to adjust how the build their road system to better cope with how traffic develops (and this is easily one of the most challenging things with the game-developing a smart road system that can handle high traffic without huge backlogs). With the detail in the simulation, you can see where each person is going, where they work, and where they live. The same works for vehicles, such that each person/car/building/etc actually serves a purpose instead of just being there, which is what Sim City does.

What's also great is that Colossal Order, the minds behind the game, continue to develop the game. For example, the first big update included the use of tunnels for roads and trains and multi-levels underground in addition to controlling the height of the roads in the base release.

Naturally, playing the game doesn't mean I'm any good at traffic simulation, and I often continue to create huge traffic messes. However, the dynamic nature of the game prevents me from settling on anything and provides an ongoing challenge to keep me interested long after I stopped playing other games.