That equals a lot of management, but finding problem areas isn’t a chore. Well, they mainly need somewhere to go, like a cemetery or crematorium. Even when they die, they still need things. They need electricity, water, waste disposal, healthcare and schools. A place to stay, a place to work and a place to shop - that’s three needs covered, but citizens need quite a bit more than that. If there’s demand for the zones, people will move in quickly, and houses, shops and factories will spring out of the earth. Residential, commercial and industrial zones can be painted next to them, or fine-tuned thanks to a zoning tool that allows you to customise the area by filling in the entire thing or painting each small square individually.

Building it is like filling in the gaps between the roads. Everything grows up around them.Īfter that first tiny bit of road construction, the city is ready to be built. Eventually that will connect up with elevated intersections, roundabouts, bridges and other roads both small and huge. The very first thing you do is drag out that first stretch of tarmac from the highway, the first little piece of the city.

As I fiddled around with the game for the first time, trying to get an old lady to use my bus, I started to wonder what a full-on city-builder developed with this eye for detail and this obsession with the veins that fuel cities would look like.Įverything in Skylines starts with a road. Underneath that, though, is a game where every resource at the player’s disposal goes into keeping the blood flowing through the arteries of a city.Įach stretch of road, every bus stop, every link in the transport network is important, and even small changes can have meaningful results. Ostensibly, it’s a game about running a transport company and making it a successful business. In early 2013, I played a preview build of Cities in Motion 2, the previous game developed by Skylines dev, Colossal Order.

Cities skylines vs simcity