Cities: Skylines
The modern king of city building, with traffic simulation that will break your brain.
Review
Cities: Skylines arrived in 2015 as a direct response to SimCity (2013) — a deeply flawed, always-online reboot that disappointed millions of franchise fans — and delivered exactly what that game was supposed to be. A deep, systems-rich city builder with genuine traffic simulation, complex zoning, a robust infrastructure toolkit, and the creative freedom to design cities at whatever scale your machine can handle. It sold over 12 million copies and became the definitive city builder of its era.
The traffic simulation is the game's defining feature and its greatest source of frustration. Vehicles pathfind intelligently through your city's road network, and the difference between a city that flows and one that locks into gridlock is the quality of your intersection design, highway on-ramp placement, and public transit coverage. Watching a city you've designed run smoothly — buses hitting their schedules, cargo trucks efficiently moving goods — is deeply satisfying. Watching it collapse into a six-lane standstill from a single bad interchange is a learning experience.
The modding community is one of gaming's richest: tens of thousands of assets, road packs, intersection templates, UI overhauls, and gameplay systems — including traffic manager mods that add realistic lane usage rules — have extended the game's life far beyond what a vanilla release could sustain. The successor Cities: Skylines 2 (2023) had a troubled launch, making the original and its expansions the still-preferred choice for most dedicated city builders.
Strengths and Limits
- Deep, realistic traffic simulation rewards thoughtful infrastructure design
- Enormous modding community with extraordinary asset and tool variety
- Creative freedom to build at any scale and style
- Public transit, water, power, and zoning systems all deeply interconnected
- Excellent value — years of content at a low base price
- Traffic AI can produce frustrating gridlock from minor design oversights
- Late-game cities require hardware beyond most gaming PCs to run smoothly
- Base game lacks some quality-of-life features added only through mods
- Cities: Skylines 2 was disappointing, keeping the community fragmented
Reader Fit
This review is written around fit: who should play it, what kind of session it rewards, and what friction might make it wrong for another reader. A high grade does not mean every player should buy it immediately. It means the game has a clear identity, a strong reason to exist, and enough craft to justify attention from the right audience.