Cities: Skylines - Part 1: My (lack of) History With This Game

 

I've never done a post on a game that I have only briefly played before. Cities: Skylines was released in 2015 and has been on my radar since. After 2013's Sim City flop, Skylines has been the premiere city-building game on the market. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Sim City (see the numerous City Journal posts I've made), so it's curious as to why I've never really played Cities: Skylines. It turns out there are a couple of reasons for this that I'd like to explain in this post. After my mods quit working in SimCity 4, and after a trip to Chicago (a city that always inspires me to play SimCity), I decided it was time to give Cities: Skylines (C:S) a chance.

One of the common themes that you'll read about C:S is that it requires a powerful PC, something that I've never owned. In fact, when my Dell desktop from college crashed in 2014, I started using a Mac and have used a Mac since. None of the Macs that I've owned were purchased with gaming in mind. However, C:S is available on MacOS, and in 2019 I purchased the Mac version of the game via Steam. I played the game very little due to sketchy frame rates and overall clunkiness of maneuvering the camera. I've also had this game available on the Switch. While often times games that are on console are optimized for that console for performance, I was a bit skeptical of playing C:S on the Switch, given its performance concerns on powerful PCs. The Switch isn't exactly packing a lot of horsepower when it comes to graphics, so I was concerned it would have similar frame rate issues as my Mac.

Performance concerns were one reason why I haven't played C:S in the past. The main reason why I haven't played the game, however, is because of its complexity. With experience and the help of mods, I have developed a formula on SimCity 4 to build very large cities very fast. C:S has a bit of a steep learning curve and is a bit more complex compared to SimCity 4, and that has been a big barrier to me wanting to play the game. While I've obviously enjoyed playing SimCity 4, the gameplay has become a bit stale (as you would imagine 20 years into playing the game), and I've seen some really cool cities that have been developed on C:S. With the game being available to play on the PS5 (the PS4 version, however), I finally feel confident that I have a platform with enough power to handle the game's complexity. The mods on SimCity 4 breaking were the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. I feel that now, more than ever, the time has come to give this game a chance.