Considering everybody now seems to hate SimCity with a fiery passion, I’d say there’s room in our lives for another city-building sim.
Enter Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines, a huge sandbox where you can create the city of your dreams. You can play offline from the start, too. Imagine that!
Colossal Order is the Finnish developer responsible for Cities in Motion 1 and 2, both of which were generally quite well received. Skylines seems like a bigger, more ambitious project, with bigger maps, reworked mechanics and a shiny new graphics engine.
No word on a planned release date yet, but we’ll keep an eye out for further announcements.
Main features:
City policies: Set policies to guide how the city and districts develop over the course of your playthrough.
City districts: Personalize city districts with names of your choice for variety and personality.
Road building and zoning
Unlock buildings and services
Taxation: Fine-tuning the city budget and services and setting tax rates to different residential, commercial and industrial levels and controlling what kind of areas are more likely to spawn in the zoned areas
Public transportation: Build transport networks throughout the city with buses and metros
Outside connections: Make industry and commercial districts flourish with new customers in the neighboring cities
Wonders: the ultimate end-game content that the players strive towards
Huge maps: Unlock new map tiles with unique possibilities to expand the city
Water flow simulation: Add new challenges to water services.
Polished visual style and core gameplay
Modding tools: Built in feature designed to encourage creative pursuits.
