Cities: Skylines Xbox One Edition Review

"Perfect Console City Building"

Campaign

Cities: Skylines is a popular city building simulator available on PC for many years, that entire experience has now been ported to Xbox One with great success. I was somewhat worried that the transfer might not be great considering how intensive these games can be when they reach larger sizes and everything here just gets adjusted accordingly. It's quite incredible actually and the full version of the game is indeed running fine. Being a city builder you get some basic options to start whether that's regular play with traditional settings or the free sandbox settings with no restrictions. From there you just build whatever sort of city you'd like and can waste away hours expanding it.

Purely going over the traditional settings as sandbox is just free build, there are challenging aspects. You'll need to set realistic budgets, monitor expenses for what supplementary structures you'll have and keep people happy. This means that you'll need more than just coal plants with bus routes, parks or other leisure focused activities to keep the the moral high. If you don't, everyone will get angry and it will be harder to expand. It's an incredibly in-depth game offering open landscape templates to build and expand with free tools to do whatever with. Most buildings are locked to roads, but you can choose how they're structured and even view my city while it was in-progress during the review below. More advanced structures are available behind tiers and you'll have to achieve certain levels of population before gaining access to them.

Gameplay

Another issue that was solved beautifully here was the controls, being such a complex game there are many menus and tools for creating things. The entire menu system feels intuitive, smooth and responsive with the controller providing a pleasing experience. The game also looks fairly good considering how complex things can get with people running about or cars driving and many zooming angles for you to enjoy. Nothing was difficult to learn despite there being many in-depth settings for control of your city. You'll have to manage everything though, from bus routes to the water lines and even electricity to match your citizens' needs.

The Conclusion

Cities: Skylines Xbox One Edition was great and I couldn't imagine a more perfect version of a city builder for the console. I love these simulation type games where you get to control cities and this is hits the spot just right. I really don't have any complains about the title finding it have a wide range of options, buildings and things to do. You could realistically spend hours sitting there and watching the city grow, with great amounts of freedom. You can have a somewhat serious building environment or even just use an open sandbox setting with unlimited money and resources. Everything you could want for this type of game is here and hopefully it gets expanded upon in the future. For those that have played the PC version this includes the base and the After Dark expansion.

Cities: Skylines Xbox One Edition Review on Xbox One
Review Code Provided by Paradox Interactive

Rating Overall: 9.0