Cities: Skylines Reviews

I love City Skylines, but not enough to recommend a game that has SO much DLC that the company making it builds a whole new subscription service around it.

Cities is one of my favorite games. Every time I come back to it, I spend days playing it before not touching it again for the year. I really wish it had more content, but I'm too poor to afford all the DLC. The fact that this game is OLD and has excess DLC, all of which is full price, is really demoralizing to someone who's already struggling for the basics. c:

Cities: Skylines is the perfect game for anyone who loves building, planning, and managing a city from the ground up. It gives you complete control over every aspect of your city, from zoning and traffic management to public services and policies. The level of detail is incredible, and the freedom to design your city exactly how you want makes every playthrough unique. The game does an amazing job of balancing creativity with challenge. It starts off simple, but as your city grows, you'll face real-world urban planning problems like traffic congestion, pollution, and budget management. Solving these issues is incredibly satisfying and keeps you engaged for hours. The modding community also adds endless possibilities, with new assets, mechanics, and features that take the game even further. Cities: Skylines is one of those games where you sit down to play for an hour and suddenly realize the whole night has passed. Whether you're a casual player just looking to build a beautiful city or someone who enjoys the challenge of optimizing every system, this game has something for everyone. It's an absolute must-play for city-building fans.

I love this game but the choice to update it in such a way that breaks some of the best mods keeping this game alive in 2025 while you flounder over your absolute dumpster fire of a sequel is dastardly and and a P.O.S move. the game was fine. We literally dont care about whatever 10 year content you wanted to throw in. get a grip

Death by a thousand cuts. The base game is very basic, and you'll be quick to find things that where included in Transport Tycoon Deluxe (1995) or SimCity2000 are blatantly missing and packed into tiny tiny DLCs. So yeah, even if you buy the base game at 90% off I consider it to be so stripped down it's not worth considering it to be a playable city builder. So then you check what DLC you might want and quickly find that to even get to a point where a basic city builder experience is achieved you are spending well beyond what a AAA game would normally cost. To top that, if you are a completionist and want the whole thing you are looking at spending $400 or more. At that price point it's hard to see the value proposition making sense from a consumer standpoint. Just to see what the full game with all DLC is actually like, I "played it at a friends house". It's quite good, but not $400 good. Maybe if the base game wasn't stripped down to a point where it's boring to play for more than an hour and the full DLC experience wasn't this ridiculously priced it might have grabbed me more... but in the end I regret buying the base game, regret spending time on it and I am committed to never buying the DLC unless the entire purchase comes down below $35. I just wouldn't be able to enjoy myself knowing I paid more than that.

Big fat "NO!" to all attempts to integrate a subscription model into a single-player game! Instead of debugging and polishing the second iteration of the game, the devs decided to do a quick money grab by seemingly giving away the first base game and, at the same time, introducing an all-dlc subscription! A subscription to get access to all those overpriced dlcs! Such a shameful act of disrespect to the players must not be tolerated! If these bunch of lazybones succeeds, each and every new game will be cut into pieces and then infinitely sold to us – players – via atrocious subscriptions!

Game is good, but this company doesn't respect it's customers. You can buy DLCs for this game relatively cheap off of random keystores, yet they want to start a subscription service to catch ignorant customers who lack this knowledge. Mind you, this is being done 10 YEARS after release AND after the failure of the newest game in their series. Do not fall for this trickery. If you do not own this game already, or if you are thinking about buying DLC for it, look on safe, alternative market places for sales rather than opt into a subscription service that will likely cost you more in the long run.

good game, but for ducks sake, the dlcs cost (at least in the current sale) almost 30x the base game price... also why do you have to have your own launcher? it get's annoying and makes it harder to play on linux

Love this game to bits. This development and publishing team is something else though. They struggle to make the right move consistently. Even in instances where there could be literally no wrong move they defy expectation and release SUBSCRIPTION services for a decade old game- as a little "thank you" for its literal 10th year of existing. As if insult to injury they are not even cheap GamePass levels of subscriptions. We are talking [b]$52.99 CAD for 6 Months access- OVER $100 Canadian dollars for a YEAR[/b] subscription. They have clearly been aspiring to be the Adobe of the gaming genre with this one. Keep in mind, this move for subscriptions is just the newest "What are you even doing" move in a long list of them from this group. Just off the top of my head: First it was the endless DLC slog that added just enough useful crap in between that actual utter garbage that you'd be hard pressed not to buy it for $20 here, $20 there. On to the "Paradox Launcher" update where they post launch, years later, added the additional pop-up prompt. Coupled with the brand new "If you start this game you consent to us harvesting data from you" Terms of Service changes. Followed by another handful of shlock DLC. Straight into the ongoing disaster that was Cities Skylines 2. No content, ugly content, broken content. They walked back their own deluxe edition content because how awful it was. Radio silence. No initial mod support, no Steam Workshop support- now you need to use their service "Paradox Mods" to get community mods to fix [b]their broken game[/b] Now here we are. As a huge thank you for ten years of people playing the original game that made them the leaders in this genre. Ten years of content creators, streamers, youtubers. Ten years of modders who made the game amazing to play- Subscriptions. Subscriptions and THREE more DLCs on the 25th of March. It seems after the Cities Skylines 2 pre-order money has dried up they have doubled back to this gem to stomp and squeeze a little more out of it instead of trying to make CS2 palatable. [b]So here is a helpful list.[/b] - Avoid all "Radio" DLC. Its overpriced filler garbage for bundles to inflate the price. - The Content Creator packs are big hit or miss'. There are youtubers who have reviewed the packs content. - Don't buy the Map bundles. Workshop map creators are incredible. Use the workshop. - Mods will make the game. Use the workshop. People have made "collection packs" - The big DLCs that add to or change the game are as followed: After dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green cities, Parklife, Industries, Campus, Sunset Harbour, Airports, Plazas & Promenades, Financial Districts, Hotels & Retreats. - Never pay full price for this stuff. I recommend you look up "isthereanydeal" (is there any deal) They list every legitimate site that has authorised game keys. There are other places too. Just don't pay full for this. Subscriptions. Ha.

"Z:\Games\steamapps\common\Cities_Skylines\Cities.exe" %command% Right click the game in your library Go to properties Paste this line under launch option, replacing the file path with your own Enjoy the game without needing paradox's dumbass launcher