If your heart was broken by EA's ham-fisted attempt to resurrect its beloved SimCity franchise in 2013 then pay attention, because we've got something you're going to be interested in.
Paradox Interactive has just released *Cities:
Skylines* -- a city-building simulator that gets almost everything right, delivering the game that wannabe town planners have been waiting for for more than ten years.
It all begins with an open field, of course. You get a plot of empty land and a highway exit, and it's your job to turn it into a buzzing metropolis. To begin with, you have just a few tools to play with. Some roads, a tool that lets you designate zones of residential, commercial and industrial activity, and basic water, sewage and power infrastructure.
As your population rises, more facilities unlock. You'll gain access to primary schools, more advanced power plants, healthcare facilities, police, firefighters and parks. And that's when the fun starts. As you grapple with the optimum location for your fire station, sewage will start backing up because you've taken your eye off your water treatment capacity. While you're sorting that out, brownouts will spread over a big new residential area you've just zoned because your power plants can't quite keep pace with demand. A big chunk of your time will be spent in reactive mode, solving a series of problems that the complex simulation throws up.
It's not quite whack-a-mole, because your residents are generally pretty patient about the resolution of their issues. But ignore a problem, like we did in our first city with our shops demanding more educated workers, and you'll eventually end up with a ghost town, the residents having moved on to better places.
That's about as close as it gets to game over, and with a lot of patience, it's almost always possible to recover even the worst situations. In fact, if you're even slightly competent, you'll end up in the reverse scenario -- where your attempts to balance the challenges of mayorhood are mostly successful. That's when the game feels its most satisfying -- when you're delivering a comfortable budget surplus and can afford to take the time to plop down a new park to reward your citizens for their patience over the education fiasco. Seeing the little smiley faces pop up across the neighborhood as you do so is a great feeling.
If it lacks anything, it's an identity of its own. It's clear that it's been created with the express aim of satisfying what people wanted from SimCity, and it does that incredibly successfully, but in doing so it jettisons any hope of developing its own individuality. The few attempts to do that fall flat, like the on-screen Twitter-style feed that lets residents complain about their rubbish piling up, or praise your commitment to clean energy when you build a wind turbine. It quickly gets irritating, though can be easily turned off.
On the bright side, there's full modding support, so you can bet that someone will find a way of making it less annoying before long. Mod support will almost certainly solve my only other criticism -- that the buildings, while feeling comfortable and familiar to fans of the widely-loved SimCity franchise, lack a little in variety.
That franchise is dead now, of course. The studio that birthed it was, in an unfortunate coincidence, shuttered mere days ago. But there's no need to grieve unduly, because thanks to Cities: Skylines, its city-building legacy is in safe hands.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
