Rob Zacny

Episode 298: Cities: Skylines

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This is, by far, the most drug-filled, corpse-ridden, communism-fueled episode of Three Moves Ahead yet. Cities: Skylines has quickly become the darling of the city management scene and Fraser Brown, Rowan Kaiser, Sean Sands, and Rob Zacny are here to tell you why.

 

Fraser's Review

Read Sean's thoughts here

 

Listen here.

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I'm very interested to listen to this episode. With lawn mowing season right around the corner I'll be listening to more podcasts. I did read Fraser's review and in my opinion it paints too rosy a picture of Skylines. I agree with his assessment that it is the best Simcity style city builder. It gets the basics right and tweaking traffic can be very enjoyable. Once I took a more critical look at the simulation the magic started wearing off. There are no consequences for workers not being able to get to their jobs due to traffic. They magically teleport back home if they are stuck for too long with the person and business no worse for the wear. If CO is able to add meaningful consequences for this issue it will go a long way towards plugging this hole. 

 

Traffic does have other meaningful repercussions - services such as garbage pickup is less efficient and it can cause problems, but the worker - business thing really bugs me. Those data overlays usually answer the most basic questions, but more in depth inquiries are not easily satisfied. I don't know if its because people are so happy to get a traditional SimCity style city builder that wasn't a disaster, but I think the gaming media has overlooked the considerable flaws Skylines has. It isn't bad by any means and with Paradox's great post release support I can see this becoming awesome, but it isn't there yet. I hope the podcast brings up some of Skylines weaknesses to give a balanced look at this game.

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