Cities: Skyline is what Sim City wanted to be. It's the proof that you can make good city simulation games, it's an amazing game that brings back to me all of my memories about city simulators - the last one I had played before Sim City was the SNES version of Sim City, so bear with me here - and while I struggled to understand the core systems of the game - and some would argue that even when I had 'finished' my time with it, I still struggled to understand how proper city planning worked - and found a weird glitches here and there, I had a wonderful time and would recommend it 100% to anyone enjoying city sims.
Creating my first town was a bit of fumbling around, I didn't know that I shouldn't start by building tons of roads, leaving me no money for basic services like water and electricity, I didn't know that you didn't need to place power lines literally everywhere to transport power, etc. Even when my first town managed to get going in a satisfactory manner, I had already made a few mistakes, like having very narrow roads come out of the highway at 90-degree angles right out of the bat. Most of these things could have been prevented by some kind of tutorial. The game is chock-full of explanations for most of its system, but as a coherent whole there is no "If it's your first time in a city sim here's what you should do here" mode.
Like Sim City, everything starts with roads. You place roads from the highway and zones appear around them, you can choose if you're going to place residential, commercial or industrial zones in these empty squares, and houses/commerce/factories will pop out over time accordingly. You also have to place most city services near roads, and they need to be able to go from point A to point B in a timely fashion, or you'll get in terrible situations like I did where buildings are piling up with corpses and trash because of traffic jams. The game is bad at helping you manage your roads in order to reduce traffic, I had some issues with the one-way roads and upgrading is a terrible pain; indeed, going from one street size to the next one usually means you're going to bulldoze everything around the road. Worst is when you have special buildings (like fire stations or schools), then you just can't upgrade. You need to move things around, upgrade, then move them back.
Population count gates most of the content in C:S. You start with only a few features and they unlock as you get more and more people in your city. Features are doled out quickly at first - policies, loans and services all unlock at once, for instance, but as you get near the 'end' of the game, you might only unlock a nuclear power station for 'leveling up' your city. This makes a certain stretch of the game boring, while you're just waiting for new stuff to unlock, even at the fastest speed setting, it takes quite a long time. You also unlock unique buildings by doing certain 'weird' things, like having 3 full cemeteries or taxes under 4% for 20 weeks. These buildings are ultimately boring, because all they do is act at leisure - and are requirement for equally boring 'monuments'. I kinda wish they would do more than that. The monuments have some properties too, but increasing tourism or giving education for all isn't really the 'power' I was expecting from an end-game building.
Policies are neat ways to customize your cities depending on where you are in the development of your town. While you might not have the cashflow to reduce water/power consumption - in exchange for a upkeep on all buildings - at a certain point, it might help you to do so at another. It helps focus your city in some ways - but I've found that most of them, except maybe banning pets and smoking, can just be turned on and left on after a certain point, with no big disadvantage besides a small drain on your funds. I wish they were bigger choices that really impacted the way your city developed. At least you have a few choices in order to tackle problems; Too much trash can be fixed by adding more dumps, or by increasing your trash collecting budget, or by adopting a policy to implement recycling.
I've had all sorts of problems with my city. Factories closing down as quickly as they are built because of lack of uneducated workers. Not enough schools, not enough crematoriums, not enough shoppers, too much trash piling up everywhere - that was the most frequent one - buildings burning down and people getting sick. Most of these problems were all simply explained by the insane traffic jams in my town. Even so, my population happiness never dropped enough for me to be told about it. The game has plenty of different views to lay on your city in order to see where the problems are, so information is pretty available. What it lacks is clear solutions to your problems. How to fix lack of uneducated workers? I can't just go around destroying schools and building more residential zones won't magically bring workers to my town. Why do people complain about trash when I'm literally doing everything I can - short of destroying their homes in order to create larger roads?
I've also seen my share of weird glitches, train lines forever stuck on the map even though the train station was destroyed, boats floating onto solid ground and into each other, etc. But this didn't stop me from having a wonderful time with such a great city sim. Planning bus routes, seeing people moving around and being able to follow vehicles as they go on their way, buying more terrain and building more and more things. More coal plants and universities, airports and complex subway systems, enacting policies to help struggling businesses, handling the budget - mostly by increasing everything to 150% except cops which I never needed - and taking loans. Going from a small struggling village into a vast booming - and still struggling - metropolis.
That's what City Simulators are all about.
