Cities: Skylines - After Dark Review (AppleReshiram)
A Good First Expansion With Some Minor Woes
The Core Content
After Dark is good expansion to the main game, bringing the late night mechanics by expanding it with the two new specializations for commercial: tourism and leisure. Public transportation is also expanded, adding the Bus Station where a single station can hold up to ten stops and can act as a hub for all your bus lines. The addition of international airport allows for greater plane traffic and taxis provide citizens and tourists with greater modes of transportation. Your citizens can now ride bikes and you can also build dedicated bike paths and bus lanes for your city. Finally there are some new sea side based parks to further expand upon the idea of building a seaside vacation paradise.
NOTE: You get the day/night cycle graphics in the base game. You do not need the DLC for it.
The Good
After Dark's Leisure specialization provides the city with a new way to earn more money. Leisure earns far more than their equivalent commercials, but also creates far more noise. They also act as a way to attract more tourists in addition to unique buildings. Unique buildings will perform better when they are surrounded by Leisure and they take advantage of earning quite a good amount of income at night when regular commercials close. This creates a unique senario where you want to have a nice balance of Leisure and generic to give you nice income at night, whilst still having strong income in the morning, (as level 3 generic commercial will still earn more than leisure).
Additionally, the DLC includes a few new policies that are incredibly useful. "Schools Out" ensures citizens in a district will prefer to go to work rather than study at a university, which may aid you in overcoming the problem of your industry becoming abandoned. "Old Town" can be used to force only people living in that district to be able to use the roads there, which may help alleviate your traffic problems especially if other cars are simply using it to get to another place. And with the new bicycles and "encourage biking" policy, you can significantly reduce traffic even further with cims prefering to cycle than use a car.
The Bad
There are a few unfortunate problems with this DLC. Despite introducing more to tourism, it is still, to my experience playing, impossible to make a profitable tourist city, or even just a profitable tiny tourist district. This is because the cost to maintain unique buildings and the services to bring the tourists in are enormous. Airport and Harbor income will never earn enough to break even in my trials, Taxis consistently earn just half of their upkeep costs despite having all taxis in used 100% of the time. A tourist district of 5k square earn me only 2-3k weekly from tourists while an equivalent from a Leisure district earns me 10-12k. Something is clearly wrong here. I should expect at least 10k from my tourists and even earning 10k would not come close to covering the costs to maintain the harbor, the plane, the unique buildings and taxis, therefore still ending in a loss. Essentially, you could be earning way more if you simply deleted all your unique buildings and Harbor, Airport, and the Space Elevator and simply focused on generic and leisure. You can't just only delete unique buildings as you NEED them to attract tourists, which in my experience, never earns enough to pay them back. As someone who finds efficiently managing the budget of a city to be part of the fun, I find it disappointing that tourism is simply not profitable, and in fact, just a source of loss. The game also doesn't explain the idea of city "attractiveness" very well, which is some invisible score that determines how many tourists spawn. There's just no indication of what you are doing wrong with tourism, if any. Right now, Tourism serves no purpose other than eye candy. Expensive Eye candy.
If however, in my subsequent playthroughs I manage to make tourism profitable, I will amend this review. As of now, and some discussion in the forums, it seems it just isn't.
Conclusion
Overall, I give this game a solid B. a 7/10. It's a solid DLC, Leisure is great specialization to take advatage of for greater source of income. Some of the new parks are nice. Bicylces, bus lanes, and the new policies are all nice. Taxis are cool to look at though unprofitable. Tourism is just not well thought out. Had tourism been economically balanced and taxis not cost twice as much to maintain than they earn, I would give this DLC an A. Right now, it's a B. so there you go.
B/10