They drive cars, take trains, and even walk dogs. Submerged Jared PettyLet’s zoom in for a moment: we can see individual humans walking through the streets, going to work or school, engaging in leisure activities, or returning home by the thousands.

You can even create tax incentives for a specific type of zone within each district. In industrial zones, you can specialize the businesses to exploit a map’s natural resources in the area to mine ore, drill for oil, farm on fertile land, or harvest trees for forestry. Simply paint a chunk of your city with the District tool, and you can not only name it so you can spot it easily on the map, but give it unique policies that regulate everything from mandating smoke detectors to reduce fire hazards (at a cost) to legalizing recreational drug use for lower crime rates, or banning highrise buildings to create defined downtown and suburban areas. With such large cities, it’s fantastic that Skylines allows you to define and regulate areas individually. And while you can’t directly edit terrain while you play, there’s an included map editor where you can create any land mass you choose before you jump in - or download one from the prominently integrated Steam Workshop mod support. Suffice it to say, there’s plenty of room. Then it does this seven more times, for a total possible area of 36 square kilometers. Each game begins as deceptively small, constricting you to a four-square-kilometer area (the same size as a SimCity map, entirely by coincidence I’m sure), but quickly allows you to buy access to an adjacent plot of land of equivalent size. Cities: Skylines does that.The first way this sim knocks it out of the park is in its scale. Those basics are all tried and true - you couldn’t have a city-builder without them - so it’s mandatory that they be done well. Skylines finds a mostly happy medium between the complexity of SimCity 4 and the relative simplicity of SimCity 2013 by automatically attaching zoneable areas to roads as they’re laid, but still holding onto obligatory busywork like laying water pipes. Playing as part mayor, part god-king with the power to arbitrarily bulldoze your simulated citizens’ dreams and create schools with a click, building a city from scratch is mostly conventional: lay down roads with the easy-to-use tools, designate zones for residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, provide utility services, reap the tax boon, then repeat the cycle with new stuff that’s been unlocked by your growing population hitting new milestones.

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