Cities: Skylines Review

The design decision that matters is that the cars are not decoration. Each citizen has a home, a job and a route, and traffic emerges from those routes rather than from a density formula, so a gridlocked intersection is a legible problem you can diagnose and fix with a one way street or a roundabout. That makes the game teach itself. Districts with local policies, a genuinely useful road tool with curves and elevation, water simulation that punishes putting sewage upstream of your pumps, and nine unlockable map tiles give a build room to grow for fifty hours.

Shipping with full mod support and a workshop was the commercial masterstroke, and the asset library is now larger than the base game by an order of magnitude. It has a specific flaw that never went away: pathfinding sends every agent down the single shortest route rather than distributing across reasonable ones, so late cities develop unrealistic jams that no real planner would see. The expansion pack cadence has also been relentless.