Cities: Skylines

vaguely remember this being fun enough

Simulation games and citybuilders have always tugged at my brain, but rarely do I settle into them. Now I know why: this was the citybuilder I've been waiting for. It is shockingly intuitive, loaded with features and different challenges, and endlessly replayable. It hits some limitations when you reach successful heights and some mechanics still remain murky/up for debate despite the game nearing a decade old, but this should be an instant win for any sim fan.

Genre-defining.

I needed to watch some online tutorials because the in-game tutorial didn't even come close to cutting it. Once I got the hang of things, I had a pretty good time for a weekend, then never felt compelled to touch it again.

This was the SimCity game I dreamed of having since I was a little kid. I've sunk over 100 hours into it, but it gets frustrating investing so many hours into the perfect city when the mechanics of the game begin to fall apart once you hit ~200k people (like maxxing out the number of vehicles that can be spawned at once), not to mention the coding is super-inefficient and slows my machine to a crawl. I really like what they've done so far, and look forward to a perfected refined sequel.

Doesn't reinvent the wheel but brings chill vibes all the same.

The actual game itself I think is a lot of fun. I envy some of the more creative players on their city building skills however I still enjoy it with my limited abilities. However the low score is on account of the constant paid DLC which feel like they make the game whole, as well as lack of many quality of life elements included in mods. Also the jank I experience when building roads above the surface can be incredibly frustrating and has made me rage quit on muiltiple occasions.

Great gameplay but bad CPU intensity for a basic game. Sign of less thoughtful development.

This the spiritual successor to the single player SimCity series though it is a little more hands on then even SimCity 3000.

Great in so many ways if you are willing to spend half you time solving traffic problems. I think the devs just wanted to share their road rage with the world.

The new king of citybuilding. It has some flaws but they are so minor in the smoothness of laying out and maintaining that it more than makes up for it.

The major issue is the lack of dynamism/causality with regards to education, pollution, workforces, crime etc. As far as a city and infrastructure sim goes besides that, C:S is unparalleled. It's so great that the aforementioned issue, which could be a gamekiller, can almost go unnoticed. The only reason I'm not the computer version of the guy who converts the whole ground floor of his house into a model train set and then gets divorced is I don't have the focus.