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Due to the map and asset editor, I suspect the Steam Workshop will quickly fill with custom creations. Conversely, for those who want completely unrestrained construction, there are modes for an unlimited bank account and the unlocking of all buildings at the start. For those who find building a city to Megalopolis status just a little too easy-and I think it is-there's a 'hard mode' included to increase the challenge. My cities, even the poorly planned ones that wound up filled with horrific traffic jams and uncollected corpses, were all fun to build, and I learned enough from each to make my next city better. These issues haven't done much to dampen my enjoyment, though.

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Driver AI is a little off-kilter, and cars will sometimes cram into a single lane when others are available, which can contribute to traffic problems. Even in happy, healthy neighborhoods and commercial districts, entire buildings are routinely abandoned, and I don't quite know why. Even when business and resident satisfaction is sky-high there's sometimes zero demand for new buildings (and thus no population growth) for long stretches, and then, seemingly arbitrarily, demand suddenly ramps up again. I wish plumbing was just auto-drawn in when roads are built, not because drawing pipes manually is hard but because it's easy, and thus begins to feel like repetitive busywork after a while.

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There's a healthy five-by-five grid of land, of which you can officially purchase nine tiles of 2x2 km each, though there's already a mod in the workshop that lets you buy and build on all 25 tiles. Your available building space, initially just a single square of land, grows as well. Transportation options appear as you progress, like underground metro tubes, airports, and trains and ships for both passengers and industrial use. In addition to homes and businesses, there are unique buildings like stadiums and opera houses that become available as your city grows, as well as monuments like a space elevator and a large hadron collider that increase tourism or provide other benefits. The citizens of Skylines are pretty tolerant, but let them suffer too long and they'll abandon you in droves. It can also be terrifically tense, like when you realize your industrial zone has poisoned the groundwater of a residential area or when a power grid gets overloaded and you've got no money to add a new plant.

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It's often soothing, like when flying the free camera around or peering down at the tiny NPCs living in your creation. This gets repetitive pretty quickly, but a menu option thankfully prevents these messages from automatically popping up.ДЄt times, Skylines is intensely satisfying, such as when solving a troublesome traffic snarl or when all the buildings in a district begin leveling up because you've provided the right combination of services and amenities. Citizens can also communicate with you via 'Chirper,' a Twitter-like feed at the top of the screen. Icons appear above buildings to signal problems, like businesses with a dearth of customers or homes with sewage problems. You can view your city through several filters: pollution (including noise), crime, property values, wind speed (for turbine power), water and electricity availability, and even see how many people are using public transportation. Skylines' UI is pretty slick and easy to understand. If you're more interested in building unbroken tree-lined avenues and long, winding roads than logical grids, you certainly can, but be prepared for your city to lose a good deal of functionality.

Figuring out the best way to build roads and intersections takes time, experimentation, and close scrutiny, something I think many players will really enjoy. Garbage collection, unattended building fires, and dead body removal were recurring problems in all my cities, and it's because they all involve vehicles (hearses, in the last instance) needing to get to specific locations quickly, which is as much a function of easy access as of smooth traffic. It's not just traffic congestion you need to worry about, it's logical traffic routes.

It's more difficult to lay down roads that make sense. It's not unexpected that Skylines' biggest challenges involve roads and traffic, as it comes from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive, the same developer/publisher duo as Cities in Motion, a game based around transportation management (Cities: Skylines is not related to the Cities XL series).