Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters Review (gbuck70)
I sat on the fence for years, unable to decide if I really wanted this DLC or not. I spend a lot of time building railway networks and even custom rail stations by hand, and the idea of possibly hours of work being wiped out by a random disaster didn't sound very fun. I finally relented, and picked this up during a recent Steam sale. And it's a lot more fun than I thought it would be, and not for the reasons I thought it would be.
Pros:
1. We've all been there multiple times: a part of your city is just plain crap, and it would be way more time and effort to fix it than it would to simply wipe it off the map and re-build that area of the city from scratch. Enter the disasters on command option. You have no idea how satisfying it is to pummel some gridlocked, polluted, ghetto, industrial area where everybody is complaining about something with meteors. It's like unleashing the angry fists of God. You'll feel like Ripley in the movie "Aliens" when she says "Nuke the entire site from orbit -- it's the only way to be sure".
2. You can turn off random disasters, so there's no chance of all your hard work being carried off to The Land of Oz by some random tornado. When random disasters are turned off, you can still trigger them manually and have them happen exactly where you want.
3. The helicopters make the city feel more alive. They honestly look pretty cool flying around, and a lot of awesome people have created a lot of cool looking additional helicopters on the steam workshop.
Cons:
1. The police helicopters look really out of place swooping into low-density residential neighborhoods to catch criminals. Same with fire helicopters. This DLC adds a district policy to encourage and prioritize the use of helicopters in a district (or even the whole city if you chose), but IMO there really needs to be a district policy that does the opposite: mark a district as a "no fly zone" so they only go where allowed. I no longer use police helicopters in my cities as a result of all that which is a real shame because they look great when they're flying around downtown or industry areas.
2. The fire helicopters seem to be much less effective than fire trucks. They have to lift off, fly to a water source to fill up their bucket, fly to the fire, dump the bucket of water on the fire, and repeat. Unfortunately they often either can't get to a fire quickly enough, or their bucket simply isn't enough water to put out the fire. I've seen buildings burn down while 4 fire helicopters were trying to fight the fire, which is pretty silly. And it appears that if fire helicopters respond to a fire, then that's it. You won't see a fire helicopters and fire trucks working together to put out a fire. This thing really needs those big AC-130 tanker aircraft which are used to dump insane amounts of water or some other sort of chemical which can put out a massive fire in one swoop.