Name: | Cities: Skylines |
Release date: | March 10, 2015 |
Platforms: | PC, XBOX ONE, PS4 |
Genre: | Tycoon |
Metacritics Rating: | 85 (PC) |
Our visitor's rating: | N/A |
Average playtime: | Varied |
Our recommendation
Cities: Skyline is a city-builder game developed by Paradox Interactive. The game has no story or setting, and is instead a sandbox-type game focused on building large, modern cities, maintaining them and the happiness of their inhabitants.
Gameplay is fairly simple at first, but gets increasingly much more complex. You start building roads and houses on various maps and see them grow into a sprawling metropolis by the time you've finished. This can pose many challenges - traffic congestion, crime, pollution from factories and many others. When you overcome these obstacles and get your city to grow, you unlock more buildings and infrastracture possibilities - which again, brings its very own problems you will need to solve.
Cities: Skylines is probably the number 1 game when it comes to city building simulations, and for many a great spiritual successor of Sim City - with its solid foundations, years of updates and DLC and a vast community of modders that can change up your game even more, you are looking at potentially hundreds of hours of peaceful city building. If you are looking for action or story though, this is probably not the game for you - instead it is for the person who loves to spend hours slowly building beautiful cities and then marvelling at what they created.
Adds expanded options for tourism and entertainment in your cities - districts can become focused on leisure or tourism. Also adds much expanded day/night cycle - people go to bars and clubs after dark, enlivening the city further. Adds bars and restaurants, commercial areas specializing in leisure activities, and things like fishing tours to make the city more active.
Snowfall adds snow and rain to your cities and other effects, as well as some mechanism tied to these weather events, like snow plows. Also adds trams as a public transit option, improvements to roads, and other. Is generally thought of as being of poor value and easily replaceable with mods.
It adds as the name suggests, natural disasters to play with, ranging from tornadoes through electrical storms to tsunamis. Also adds a mission editor that allows players to choose their own end goals, effectively allowing them to win or lose a game on their own terms.
It adds many additional traffic options to use in your cities, like ferries, monorails, blimps or cablecars. Also adds big mass transit buildings that allow citizens to use more than one kind of traffic in one go. New challenges are also in this DLC, connected to transit scenarios that challenge the player to solve traffic problems for them. Was well recieved for the traffic options and redesigned traffic interface.
It adds many additional things themed around eco-friendliness and green lifestyle, like eco-friendly buildings, vegan restaurants, electronic cars, and more. All city zones now have specializations that have levels. The new buildings are considered to be fun, but many feel you can add much of the same with mods.
The main feature of the Parklife DLC is parks of all kind - amusement parks, nature reserves, zoos, city parks, and gardens. It also adds new assets such as bus line, city parks, and zoos. Also, now you can put buildings next to paths in the park and can transform the gaps between your buildings into nice park gardens.
The big thing that this DLC brings to the table is resource chains, industrial districts, and specialized buildings within those districts. You can now create, for example, farming areas, that have their own interconnected world with a hub, storages, and production facilities, and those can gain levels and allow to build unique factories to produce expensive goods for your city, such as furniture.
It adds the ability to organize concerts in your city, as well as to buld a concert hall. It also features many music tracks that you can play at your concerts, featuring several music choices, from rock to pop. It was praised for being fun and enlivening your cities, while criticized for being hard to implement and not bringing much for the price.
These include Relaxation Station and Rock City Radio. Each of them adds about 16-20 tracks of music composed specifically for the game.
Usual price: | 3.99 $ |
These include Art Deco, Stadiums, High-Tech Buildings and European Suburbia, as well as some free ones. Many of them are created by modders and added into game as official DLCs. These add many varied buildings and skins, from football stadiums to different architectures of classic housing.
Usual price: | 4.99 $ |
Platforms: | Classic store price: | Key store price: | |
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Standard Edition | PC, XONE, PS4 | 26.28 $ | 4.67 $ |
Deluxe Edition | PC, XONE, PS4 | 35.09 $ | 6.39 $ |
Standard Edition | Deluxe Edition | |
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Base game | ![]() |
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5 Unique In-game Buildings | ![]() |
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Soundtrack | ![]() |
26.28 $
27.59 $
29.99 $
29.99 $
4.67 $
5.09 $
5.83 $
The modern, social way
The classic, email way
Key resellers are sites that sell game keys at (usually) much lower prices than traditional retailers. They do this through a combination of ways, like selling keys that come in a bundle, that were on a sale and many other ways.
The reason why we separated them from traditional retailers is that these stores have been the subject of a divisive discussion for a long time.
The reason we include them is that you can buy keys on these sites usually for very big discounts, sometimes quite ridiculously cheap. In 99 % of cases, they will work the same as a much more expensive key would. For many people, especially people from countries with lower standards of living, this can mean big savings that have a significant impact on their life, while also playing the game and not resorting to piracy.
If you are buying on these stores, we have a few recommendations to follow: