In Which I Gush About Cities: Skylines

My citizens were happy. Our great city was growing, we were years past the great “dead bodies were left in homes for six months” debacle, nothing of note was on fire, and people only spent half of their lives in traffic.

Quite innocently, I noticed that our metropolis was running _dangerously_ low on power. Now, my initial instinct was to drop down another solar plant and call it a day, but I started thinking: Hey! we have these great dams we unlocked a while ago and never tried one! Maybe that could save us a little money. And, sure enough, I found a place to put a dam that resulted in more energy per dollar than any other option. I plunked it down, satisfied with my engineering feat, and continued to fuss over the expanding industrial district across town.

Then an alert popped up. “You have buildings that are being flooded! They will be abandoned soon.” Flooded? I thought to myself. How could that be? And then I saw this:

Apparently I had failed to understand the fundamental mechanics behind a dam. As in, when you dam up a stream, that water must go somewhere. And that “somewhere” was into my primary landfill, an office park, and one of my highways.

A building also started burning in the flood, because why not.

I love this game

I haven’t gotten into a SimCity style game in years. But the early buzz around Cities: Skylines was so positive (and the game was cheap — less than $25 with a coupon on GreenManGaming. So I dove in. And it’s easily the most fun with a game I’ve had in months.

I love Cities: Skylines. I love it so much I needed to pry myself away from it for an hour or so in order to tell you how much I loved it.

Cities: Skylines creates a bunch of opportunities for you to screw up, but makes those screw-ups obvious and fixable. For example, when I flooded my city in the example above, it was hilarious to me. Part of why it was hilarious was because it didn’t result in some sort of fail state. My city wasn’t irreparably ruined, I didn’t have to start from scratch, and the problem was fixable.

I’m sure if I messed up bad enough, I could totally ruin my city. But the fact that I’ve had multiple major screw-ups without reaching that kind of punishment makes me feel comfortable experimenting. I don’t feel obligated to stick to a rote formula or look up the best practices in a FAQ. I’m free to just mess around and build a cool-looking city.

Cities: Skylines has enough complicated and unpredictable interactions that I’m never quite sure what’s going to happen when I sit down. I’m largely in control of the development of my city, but like anything significantly complex, it sooner or later takes on a life of its own. And it’s exciting to see how that life develops over the course of the game.

But that’s enough talking about Cities for now. Now let’s see if I can get to 100,000 people without inadvertently poisoning the water supply again…