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Difficulty
🔲 Walk in the Park
✅ Mild Challenge
🔲 Demanding
🔲 Serious Skills Required
🔲 Prepare to Rage Quit
Visuals
🔲 Atari
🔲 Mediocre
🔲 Passable
✅ Pleasant
🔲 Stunning
🔲 Artistic Masterpiece
Audio
🔲 Unbearable
🔲 Mediocre
🔲 Serviceable
✅ Pleasing
🔲 Immersive
🔲 Eargasmic
Gameplay
🔲 Dreadful
🔲 Mediocre
🔲 Average
✅ Engaging
🔲 Exceptionally Fun
🔲 League of Its Own
Mods
🔲 None
🔲 Nothing to Write Home About
🔲 Quite a Few
🔲 Lots to Choose From
✅ Superb Modding Community
Target Demographic
🔲 Kids Only
🔲 Teens
🔲 Mature
✅ Universal Appeal
Story
✅ Non-existent
🔲 Weak
🔲 Average
🔲 Compelling
🔲 Emotionally Gripping
🔲 A Story for the Ages
Cost
🔲 Free
🔲 Bargain
🔲 Fair Price
🟦 Slightly Overpriced (base game)
🔲 Pricey
✅ Prepare to Sell a Lung (due to the DLC)
Grind
🔲 Non-existent
✅ Minimal
🔲 Moderate
🔲 Heavy Grinding Required
🔲 Korean MMO
Length
🔲 Quick Play (0–4 hours)
🔲 Short Adventure (4–10 hours)
🔲 Reasonably Long Trek (10–30 hours)
🔲 Long Haul (30–50 hours)
🔲 Epic Quest (50–100+ hours)
✅ Endless Entertainment
Replay Value
🔲 Single Run and Done
🔲 Achievement Hunter's Dream
✅ Refreshing After a Break
🔲 Countless Replays
System Requirements
🔲 Potato-friendly
✅ Moderate (vanilla/lightly modded)
🔧 High-End (moderately modded)
🔲 Cutting-Edge
🔥 Call Your Local Tech Guru (heavily modded)
Polish
🔲 Amateur Hour
🔲 Could Use More Fine-Tuning
🔲 Decent Level of Polish
✅ Smooth and Ample
🔲 High Attention to Detail
🔲 Masterfully Crafted
Performance
🔲 Outstandingly Optimized
✅ Smooth Gameplay
🔲 Occasional Performance Issues
🔲 Frequent Frame Drops
🔲 Outrageously Bad
Bugginess
🔲 Clean as a Whistle
🔲 Rare Hiccups
✅ Occasional Minor Issues
🔲 Frequent Problems
🔲 Game-breaking Bugs
Addictiveness
🔲 Easy to Put Down
🔲 Can Get Hooked
✅ Highly Addictive
🔲 Life-Consuming
Bang For Your Buck
🔲 Not Worth It
✅ Wait for Discount
🔲 Purchase at Full Price

Cities: Skylines is, perhaps, the best modern city builder available – at least until Cities: Skylines 2 is released this October. It’s an addictive game that lets you unleash your creativity as an omnipotent mayor/deity, building the city of your dreams and controlling everything from the road hierarchy to the production chain. It offers a relaxing gameplay loop with fantastic simulation that makes your city feel alive! Every civilian, or ‘cim’, has their own life. They go to school or work, go shopping, visit friends, and go back home. They park, visit parks, take public transport, or just walk or bike around. Just following a random civilian around to see what they get up to is a fun experience in and of itself!
The challenge of the game comes primarily from money management, zone planning, and traffic management. You’ll likely find yourself struggling to maintain a decent traffic flow, which is one of the main challenges of the game. However, you can play Cities: Skylines as you wish – enable ‘Hard Mode’ for a greater challenge or enable unlimited money and soil, and ‘Unlock All’, for an experience more akin to a sandbox game.
Cities: Skylines offers a variety of special buildings – clinics, hospitals, fire stations, police headquarters, and so on, most of which aren’t just cosmetic, serving actual purposes within your city. By purchasing some of the 62 DLC packs the game has to offer, you’ll be able to unlock even more content! For lists of the best DLCs, check out the r/CitiesSkylines wiki.
It’s never been more fun to create and manage a city than in Cities: Skylines, and better yet, the game has a fantastic modding community with thousands of amazing mods! Most of them are assests – mainly buildings that you can add to your game – but a lot of them affect gameplay or visuals. Some of the most notable mods include Traffic Manager: President Edition, Find It! 2, Move It, Prop Control, and Network Anarchy – all of which, and more, I would consider to be essential mods. Click here for my collection of essential mods.
Modding Cities: Skylines allows you to achieve so much more than the base game could ever offer, allowing you to achieve much smarter and realistic traffic, the ability to place any building you want anywhere, and more – not to mention assets that let you truly build the city of your dreams. You’ll find an asset on the Workshop for almost any city or country you can think of, so by downloading assets, you’ll be able to create a truly Japanese, American, Scandinavian, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese (the list goes on…) city, not to mention the many originally crafted assets and assets inspired by films and video games.
Now, one of the issues that I, and many others, have with this game is that it’s yet another game that suffers from ‘greedy developers syndrome’. Whilst most of the DLC is well-made, I’d also consider almost all the DLC packs to be too expensive, especially considering the sheer number of them. Some of the packs are quite necessary to have to get decent enjoyment out of the game – such as After Dark and Green Cities – whereas some are just collections of some assets and are not worth the price (mainly the ‘content creator packs’ – i.e., mods that aren’t free).
A lot of the DLC packs contain content that should’ve been in the base game, and it’s a hard sell when the more expensive ‘Deluxe Edition’ of the game contains precisely zero of the game’s DLC packs. Purchasing all of the game’s DLC, not including the game itself and not accounting for sales, would cost you 392 € (429 USD) at the time of writing this. That’s just too much. I’m someone who appreciates DLC in games, but not when it’s overpriced and excessive, especially when a good chunk of the DLC packs are just a few assets thrown together.
If you do decide to get this game, I would wait for a discount, and definitely get the DLCs that you want when they, too, are discounted. Get the New Player Bundle and other essential DLCs when it’s on sale – or the Cities: Skylines Collection if it has a really good sale (otherwise, it’s far too expensive, at 344 € as of writing this.

Conclusion

Cities: Skylines is a fabulous city builder – arguably the best one out there, until the sequel comes out later this year. It’s a game that offers endless replay value, with an unlimited number of ways to build and maintain your city. It offers engaging and relaxing gameplay (until you get stuck with 41% traffic flow, that is) and, assuming you have at least six of the best DLC packs, offers a lot of content to keep the gameplay engaging.
Negatives include expensive and excessive DLC, somewhat frequent bugs (although most of them visual), and relatively outdated graphics, but for a city builder, it still looks great! Ultimately, I would certainly recommend Cities: Skylines, especially if you’ve enjoyed games like SimCity in the past. Cities: Skylines is a highly polished, refined, and modern take on the city building game.
However, if you’re willing to wait, I would recommend waiting for Cities: Skylines II. That game looks absolutely phenomenal – although you do have to expect that the game will be somewhat lacklustre content-wise at launch, especially considering that the developers stated that there won’t even be any bikes in the game upon release (source).