Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines
85
Metacritic
93
Steam
91.136
xDR
Our rating is calculated based on the reviews and popularity of the game.
Price
$29.99
Release date
10 March 2015
Developers
Publishers
Steam reviews score
Total
93 (184 307 votes)
Recent
94 (1 749 votes)

Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience.

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Cities: Skylines system requirements

Minimum:

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1 (64-bit)
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.0GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+, 3.2GHz
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, 512 MB or ATI Radeon HD 5670, 512 MB (Does not support Intel Integrated Graphics Cards)
  • DirectX: Version 9.0c
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 4 GB available space
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willharkleroad4
willharkleroad4

Simply put, this is an awesome game. Ever since I heard about Cities Skylines I've loved it. The concept is simple, and the application is wonderful. This game will have you playing for years . . . literally.
There are of course a few problems with the game, but for the most part, it is very smooth. 10/10

Henry-Blitz
Henry-Blitz

Very fun City Building game, Gives me Sim City vibes from back in the day, but in my opinion this is better.

sweaterman1992
sweaterman1992

Love the many types of games you can play with this. you can play sandbox, or you can play the game or the builder. You can also just build the assets or mods. Or you can play them all.

Techno V14
Techno V14

Very relaxing game if you are looking to just build a city, especially if your bored. This game has many things to do such as designing a complex roadway or rail system. They also allow you to figure out zoning of certain areas, and so much more that you'll be able to learn about just playing the game. it is satisfying at the end when you're finished with everything and it just works so perfectly.

windblasta
windblasta

Everything Sim City should have been. Dealing with rubbish and dead people is a game mechanic that could be fixed.

ExplodingFace12
ExplodingFace12

very much good for boring days

Anonymous
Anonymous

Am sure you like spending 10 dollars for an extra building

PBJ Puffs
PBJ Puffs

This is the most expensive game you can buy. $226.25 is what you're looking at if you dig into everything

DeathsMini0n
DeathsMini0n

Great time killer! love the build it games like SimCity and now Cities

HeriPlayzYT
HeriPlayzYT

super fun and so much gameplay! bruh get the game, you will probably love it!

Adrian1947
Adrian1947

amazing game, learn a lot from city strategy haha

suttone75
suttone75

This is a really fun game for those that like to build and make cities, hence the name. It takes a little while to get the hang of it and there is A LOT to learn, but if you have patience, you can really have fun with this game and do some innovative stuff. There is a lot of videos on YouTube on how to build and maintain your cities, plus there are a lot of DLCs for this game to add on the fun and there is a ton of MODs that you can fashion to your game to try stuff out. This is a great game/buy. Hope this helps!

monory111
monory111

Please help me, My game No cars or people in the city

$1.09 McDonalds Sprite
$1.09 McDonald…

I love making cities that fail miserably. But hey! The more you play, the more you learn!

higginsm89
higginsm89

It's fun to build a city. I also enjoy that I can walk away and/or pause the game.

swen
swen

alacaksanız dlcler ile alın yoksa zevkli değil

Anonymous
Anonymous

I love that you can mod this and it is also really fun!

Dilling
Dilling

Overall this game is good, but I hate that I am forced to build the dirtiest of technologies based solely upon population size. Why must I be forced to dump my city waist into the river and continue doing so until I reach a population of 4,000 when I already have plenty of tax income to buy it with 1,000 population? My small city is thriving, why must I be arbitrarily limited from building a non polluting city without a DLC?

Miagoy
Miagoy

Awesome relaxation for years :)

UsernamesareTrite
UsernamesareTrite

Phenomenal game. Get ready to party.

SzépmezőSzárnya
SzépmezőSzárnya

Basically sim-city again, but modernized a lot. Not a bad game, but I did fear the too many possible DLCs. Thankfully the base game is playable and enjoyable too.

DiscoDisco
DiscoDisco

Used to be a great game. DLC nightmare now. Shame on them.

elmUffins
elmUffins

How to build your roads: --◯--◯--◯--◯--◯--◯--

vuthalneang
vuthalneang

crashed, unable to restart. tried so many times. money wasted, could not get the refund no support from paradox or steam

ajg0802
ajg0802

If you love infrastructure and being able to completely manage a city, this games for you.

UnfriendlyFireAlpaca
UnfriendlyFireAlpaca

This game is on a whole other level. I grew up with Sim City. City Skylines takes the city management experience to a whole new level.

wopr73
wopr73

Great game! A little bit of a learning curve in the beginning as far as navigation with the menus and warning notifications from the city residents.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Very fun game, it will consume you.

IamAmerica1776
IamAmerica1776

Great city builder overall. One of the games where hours just seem to disappear once you start building. Great music, great gameplay, and great graphics. Love this game.

vmen686
vmen686

This is a great Simulated reality and do what you want game.

RickyBobby69
RickyBobby69

great game make city make pain go away

DEADLY BACON
DEADLY BACON

Really good game, a bit hard to figure it out in the beginning but really enjoyable on the long run.

lilly.beth.black
lilly.beth.black

New to the game, better than SimCity the reviews don't lie...

Dotty
Dotty

I've had this game for years and I am totally done.

I understand that 3rd party mods come with risks and that the hosting company isn't necessarily responsible when the game stops working because comparability issues. But fucking come on. This game was designed to incorporate custom assets from the start and I have only used steam supported assets. I was 1200 hours in a city and because some stupid asset was no longer compatible after an update I no longer can play that city ever again. Are you fucking kidding me. I have tried every goddamn thing to play my saved game; nothing works. And even when I start up a fresh map, I get a fuck-ton of stupid errors that the game can't identify properly.

Fuck this game. I am so fucking pissed.

DwaynTheBlock
DwaynTheBlock

This game surprised me on how fun and satisfying it really is! I stopped playing over 3 years ago, and the moment I reinstalled it i was stuck playing for hours! Really good game and almost anyone will like it.

MajorPainOG
MajorPainOG

Awesome game, a lot of mods in the workshop to customize your experience.

ComputerNerd92
ComputerNerd92

Just a single player SimCity clone with a more realistic art style. It's not original, and it's rampant with micro transactions.

Polski Das Boot
Polski Das Boot

RIIIIIIIIIP :(((((((((((((((((( If I cant blow up the city after i build it.....

....NO DEAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

theOne
theOne

một trò chơi thế giới mở khó nhưng rất thú vị!

J3_Nyagisa
J3_Nyagisa

10/10 garbage cannot be cleared

Upscaled98
Upscaled98

Amazing game! If you don't like the constraints of money, there's a mod for that!

ciobi kamataru'
ciobi kamataru'

this is the game type you play when you're bored
kinda fun at start
rate 8/10

otis
otis

i love killing civillians with floods

Fish
Fish

For a city building game, it is absolutely fantastic. You can consider it to be the king of this genre as it combines building and managing a city very well. It is very easy to understand what is going on, made more intuitive by the popups throughout the experience. This game is not without its flaws and there are two major ones, optimisation and the sheer amount of DLCs. First of all, you need a mod for the game to use the processing power of your pc, otherwise, your gpu and cpu will be at five percent and your game will be running at ten FPS. Then, there is the amount of optional content adding major features to the game, For example, the after dark DLC, which adds cyclism as a way of transport and the tourism industry, which should be part of the base game. Speaking of it, it is quite dull due to the lack of variety in many areas, and the fact that you cannot buy the whole map, options for public transport are quite limited and (if you want to play vanilla) the map selection is not the greatest

shleds
shleds

It took me a while to get the hang of it, but it brings back memories of Sim City, it is just more complex, but worth the time investment to learn it.

tkey80
tkey80

This game is very fun but suprisingly challenging

Anonymous
Anonymous

If you like old school SimCity, then you would love this

Unethically Tasty Potato
Unethically Ta…

So erm, yeah, after 2.5k hours I can say this is quite a good game!

TL;DR: If you're new to the game, take it slow and get some context as you go, don't rush it! After a while you'll come to appreciate the awesome modding community with tonnes of content extending the gameplay, but ye be warned that your RAM/CPU might be screaming at you once you get hooked on workshop content.
(And you might spend hours looking at people just going about their business. Modded version of this game can be basically a souped-up diorama or a model trainset, but much more interactive!)

Anyways, for the full review:
This game allows you to design whatever cities you like, and going back through older saves I can definitely see how my strategies have changed from a high-rise blobbing without too much worry to more sprawling mid density cities. Personally I have come to like the "build your own working model of a city" approach rather than the "make money and spend it on flashy stuff".

The great thing about this game is the extensibility and replay-ability.
Bored with seeing high rises everywhere? Start a new city where you'll have small villages and farms.
Bored of small villages and farms? Start a new city strewn between a string of islands and heavily dependent on fishing industry.

And if you run out of things to challenge you just enter the world of mods and other workshop content.
I honestly think that the game would be long gone for me by now if it weren't for the great modding community. The amount of new gameplay mechanics that can be introduced by mods alone is staggering, and at this point the heavily-modded version I'm running feels like Cities Skylines 2 alpha, as some of the mods will challenge you in quite different ways that will change designs of your cities significantly.

The largest and most impactful mods ones are probably these:

    TM:PE (Traffic Manager President Edition) - allow you to perform traffic magic. Also let's you disable the "pocket cars" mechanics and de-spawning of cars. That means you can have actual gridlocks in your city and you'll need to learn to efficiently plan transit networks.
    Real Time: This is a mod that completely changes the time progression and behaviour of citizens. You'll actually have to deal with rush hours, events, weekends, etc. Pair that with TM:PE that disallows spawning and you'll have fun trying to transport most of your workers to their workplace by 9am. Oh and rush hour of bicycling students never gets old - if you think that "match day event" of a few hundred people coming to see football is a lot of traffic just imagine what happens when 12k students need to get to a single university building each morning. This mod really forces you to think in terms of most efficient transport solutions, and it will punish you hard if you don't your citizens needs into account. Great new layer of complexity that frankly should be in the main game.
    81 tiles: Well, now you have the whole map to play with!
    More Vehicles: Now that you have rush hours and all that space, it's good to have more available vehicles. Weirdly enough this is not to allow more cars, but to allow service vehicles and transport vehicles to spawn. They are all tied to cars limit, and that places a definite cap on how much you can grow, and this mod raises the city size ceiling quite significantly, particularly if your cars don't de-spawn. And if you decide to go for a more car-centric design you have 4x the number vehicles to play with!

And there are of course loads of other mods that help you build stuff easier/better (Road Anarchy, Quay Anarchy, Move It, Find It, Intersection Marking Tool, Precision Engineering, Node Controller - to name a few) and heaps of content that will add nice quality of life improvements. There are heaps of articles and guides pointing you to these mods, but unlike the ones in the list these are more visual / quality of life rather than "this will change the gameplay drastically". Although, of course, if I were to take them out of the activated mod list the game would feel like it's missing something.

And yeah, make sure that you have all the RAM you can get. This is genuinely the only game which has driven my RAM upgrade needs. I have recently updated from 32GB to 64GB as I was swapping to disk when playing. All those workshop items do stack up quite significantly!

And lastly, as much as it pains me to say, don't buy every DLC. If you're just starting out take it slow with the base game and add things when you've built a whole city - at least it was fun when new DLCs were coming out and I could start new cities specifically with the new content added, e.g. Night Life districts.
Kinda the same chat with mods/workshop content - take them slowly one by one and see what you like. No need to burst in with 100+ mods, it will likely sap away quite a lot of the enthusiasm: as mentioned above, some mods do change the game logic and complexity quite significantly, so if you try to handle more realistic traffic on a larger map before you've grown accustomed to it you might have a bad time. Just treat these mods as DLCs: one at a time, and a new city to try them out; this is also because once you add new content or change the gameplay mechanics your existing infrastructure is quite likely to crumble as it was built with different gameplay rules!

Thomasfan122009
Thomasfan122009

One of the only games where I can become a ruthless dictator! Love it!

thefunkestuppest
thefunkestuppest

a fun take on the sim city formula

Oodler1
Oodler1

great city simulator but i always lose

olex4005
olex4005

DO NOT INSTALL INTENSIVE MODS PLEASE

RaidYT
RaidYT

It kept on crashing ever single time I hopped on one of the maps to actually play the game.

JIR
JIR

i recommended play with mode to more fun.

Azahar
Azahar

after playing more than 50 hours game play, this game kill your time days. Cons of this game is not important "DLC" need to buy. Not like Sim City 4 it got all fixture like disasters is FREE. But This game you need to buy it. Sound Meh too me. Yes buy it during sales, if not don't buy it.

snipes13
snipes13

its the best city builder on the market

ernestshirley
ernestshirley

I paid for add-0ns e.g mining, farming forestry but only played once and then I lost the programme for doing new cities Ernest

Loon
Loon

watch traffic slowly destroy all your visions

zludingt
zludingt

Excellent city builder worth sinking hours and hours into

Zyrkk
Zyrkk

Absolutely love this game, in my opinion it is one of if not the best city builder that most people can play. This game is limited by the technology of its time, and has a few bugs, glitches, and annoyances which can be extensively fixed and expanded upon through mods. My only gripes with the game are its hard limits to city size in late game, as well as the ridiculous amount of paid DLC that Paradox loves to release

Tectonic
Tectonic

the moment you start installing mods you cant stop

Chauncy
Chauncy

surer I can play for just an hour before breakfast. builds city... looks up from pc and notices its 9:30pm

HieristJulian
HieristJulian

built a BEAUTIFUL city named "Bacon toast" (dont even think about asking)
set the taxes to max
city got angry
did the most reasonable thing possible: bombed the city with giant meteor

Anonymous
Anonymous

It's a good game it's the best city sim/building game I've played to date. But I think this game is kinda boring (not rly that boring but a bit) without the purchase of DLCs or something else. I really want the mass transit DLC and industries but some real life things has restricted me from getting it and also restricted me from making my city to the best of my ability. Overall, I would definitely recommend this game but just be prepared to pay for DLCs.

That one guy
That one guy

it took me 2 seconds to be 500K in debt
very realistic

revdoesntsleep
revdoesntsleep

i am much too stupid to understand this game

Rising_Phoenix
Rising_Phoenix

This game is a great simulation of citys!

Mopkie
Mopkie

The go-to modern day city builder.

Archonic
Archonic

The interface is fairly confusing, there's lot of layered popups in your face, the DLC is poorly explained but it's a really fun game despite all that.

brunoglopes96
brunoglopes96

Been playing this masterpiece of a game since 2017 if I'm not mistaken and it truly is the greatest city building sim ever made. As you start playing with mods, the game only gets more and more interesting, and more and more complex. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone, and I hope CO comes out with its own The Sims type simulator someday too.

kyleovadia06
kyleovadia06

I love these kind of build-up games and this is my favorite one, I want to buy the packages later on.

THE MINISTA
THE MINISTA

AWESOME DETAIL! WISH SIMCITY BEEN LIKE THIS!

Grimaldi20
Grimaldi20

great game and fun....with mods that is.

calvin.ochs
calvin.ochs

game is fire, tons of fun and play time

Trooper31
Trooper31

Great city building game the dlc's are good and the workshop mods are pretty good aswell.

DrPlayz
DrPlayz

BEST GAME EVER

make sure to not download any random mod tho the broken asset screen really stresses me out

nlanata30
nlanata30

great city builder, I feel like an urban planner