Personal and Professional Practice 3: 'Research' Studio Brief (Review) - Cities: Skylines

One of the most recent games that I have played this year is Cities: Skylines a game created by Colossal Order, a Finnish games development company. I'm usually not too big on the city creator as I can sometimes become a little bored with it as it drags on and on, but there's something about this game that got me hooked and I could spend hours perfecting my city to get everything working as well as it possibly can.

As the titles suggests the game is a city builder and your job is to build up the city in anyway you want using any means possible. Its very similar to Sim City, and especially the new one in terms of how it looks, but the mechanics of this seem to be just that little bit more special that it's contender and it definitely looks a lot better too. The problem that I had with the newest Sim City installment is the fact that you could only work on a very small square of land and it was very easy to fill that, once that was full you where kind of at a loss of what to do next. With Cities: Skylines you get a starting plot of land which is roughly 3x the size of that of Sim City, and this can be extended 9 more times! This is a plot of land that will never fully get used but it's so nice to know that you have the room to play around with it.

The graphics included in this game are gorgeous! This is one of the reasons I was also so drawn to this game as I found out it was created in the Unity Engine, it looks to me like a little toy box world all put together by me and it just looks stunning. There are lots of settings to play around with and with the introduction to mods there are lots of different camera controls that people have added to the game, like the wonderful first person mod that can be added in, allowing you to travel around your entire city from the people's perspective. It is truly wonderful and one of my favourite things about the game and I believe that every game on Steam should come with mod support as it allows people to add to it and improve it, thinking of things that the developers didn't which could then be added in during future updates.

This is just a highly recommend game for anyone inside and outside of the city building genre as it is just a brilliant game, there is so much to think about when building up your city and so much planning and trialing to do to get your roads running as smooth as possible without any traffic building up. Finding the right balance in the game between residential, commercial and industry is always going to be a difficult one but with the sheer amount of different features you can really build up a super impressive city!