It's a tiny plaster placed over a gaping wound, and I'd much prefer to see some Chinese devs making a city builder that lets you design distinctly Chinese cities. There are mods that fix the omission of the rest of the world, but usually only at a cosmetic level, as well as some light DLC that includes a few Chinese buildings. Skylines was developed by Finns and thus has Northern European and Scandinavian sensibilities, and builds on SimCity, which is distinctly American. The biggest gap, though, is the absence of notable city builders that look beyond Western cities. It's cute that anyone might think that would really do any good. Crime in general could definitely do with a rethink, since it's almost always present in urban city builders, but is never really developed into anything that can't be solved by plonking down a police station. Managing corruption and trying not to succumb to the temptations of a fatter bank balance is already demonstrably engaging thanks to Tropico, and there's room for an approach that's less of a caricature. There are threads within these broad subjects that might still be worth tugging on, though.

Interesting, sure, but also gloomy and, if it's anything like reality, Sisyphean.

I'm not sure that wrestling with class issues and the grimier parts of city living-of which there are many-would be much fun, though. City Life created a loose socio-economic system that even made classes rivals, though ultimately it didn't take it much further than the kinds of population systems that are common in economic city builders, which mostly express class as a series of needs-with the people at the top of the pile demanding more expensive and harder to obtain goods. Cities are deeply political and see some of the clearest divisions of class, but that rarely enters into the administrative puzzle of running one in a game. That would be peak numbers in another management sim.įeature-wise, there's just not much more that could be offered, but there are concepts that are still worth exploring a bit more. Even at launch, there were already pages of them, and talented modders are absolutely one of the reasons why, on a random afternoon six years after release and a year since the last DLC, there are nearly 20,000 people playing. Where there are gaps, or things that maybe don't work the way you want, there's always a mod ready to fix it.

Cities skylines all editions