Cities Skylines [PC Game Review]

Do you know what time of year it is?
It's that time of year when the Steam Summer sale comes to the internet and all our wallets get a lot emptier.
A lot.

San Fransisco... I think.

The first game I nabbed was Cities Skylines. I've been looking at this game for a little while now. It looks like SimCity but with a lot more land area.

4.5 out of 5 stars

I never reviewed SimCity 2013, or whenever it came out. My reasoning was simple. I really did not feel like panning the most recent iteration of a once beloved series.

Each square is larger than the area of land you get for a
'city' in SimCity 2013. This game wins on that fact alone.

SimCity 2013 was small, and the AI was stupid. I mean seriously stupid. Let me give an example:

You can get right down to the street at watch the cars.

A 'sim' gets a home, it is in place 'A.' He leaves home 'A' and goes to job 'B' which just happens to be the closest job that is unoccupied and he is qualified for. When he leaves job 'B' he returns to home 'C' which is the closest home that has a vacancy. He will leave home 'C' for job 'D' tomorrow, which will follow the same rules as 'B'. He's not a worker, he's a bee going from nearest flower to nearest flower. Actually bees are smarter than the AI in SimCity. (All of this is true from when I played. They may have fixed it... but I doubt it).

If nothing else, the families in Cities Skylines seem more like a collection than a random AI bot. Also, you can build underground metros in Cities Skylines, something you can't do in SimCity.

But the biggest difference?

Cities Skylines involves actual cities.
SimCity involved towns... at best.

Now that is the right size for a city. BIG.

The scope and scale of land, even in an unmodded Skylines dwarfs that of even a modded SimCity. The normal Cities Skylines area is about 36km squared. SimCity was 2km squared. Modded Skylines goes to 100km squared, and SimCity goes to a whopping 9km squared. Tiny comparatively.

You can actually make a full sized city in Cities Skylines.

Now it's not a perfect game. It takes a touch more learning than SimCity did. I have yet to fully get the map creator down (yeah, you can make your own maps!) or fully grasp everything in the game. But I'm learning, and it is wonderful compared to the dinky mess that was SimCity. So perhaps a bonus half star was give in this review just because this game was what SimCity should have been...  

Wonder what I'll get next on the Steam Summer Sale.