COVER FEATURE Cities: Skylines II
Six years in the making, CITIES: SKYLINES II hopes to keep you building for the next decade
The moment Cities: Skylines II clicked for me was when I unlocked farms. One of several specialist industries included in the city-building sequel, farms produce a variety of crops and livestock from a circular outline around the central farming structure. Because of this, each farm occupies a large expanse of land, giving these areas a very different vibe from your dense and bustling town centre.
In the first Skylines, having a small number of buildings occupy so much space would have been impractical. But Skylines II is built to accommodate more dispersed, low density settlements. “When you are building the city, you don’t necessarily have to think about a huge city, you can actually have these more rural spaces,” says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of developer Colossal Order. “It’s completely up to you how you want to go about building the city and what your story for the city is.”
That’s the key difference between Skylines II and its predecessor. Whereas the original was about building a city, Skylines II is about building your city. How it looks. How it functions. How it makes money. Skylines II has been built from the ground up to let you build not just a big city, but a specific one.
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
A game of Skylines II starts out in familiar fashion. You pick your map, lay down a few roads, and assign the areas either side of these roads to three starting zone types – residential, commercial and industrial. Connect your power and water supplies, and soon you’ll see cranes pop up across your fledgling settlement. Before long, you’ll have rows of picturesque houses in your residential area, local businesses in your commercial zones and smoke-belching factories in your industrial areas.
There are some apparent differences at this early stage. Water pipes and electrical cables are now laid as part of the road network, thereby alleviating much of the faff surrounding these basic amenities. You can also lay electrical cables underground, so your city isn’t crawling with unsightly metal pylons. And of course, it all looks much prettier than the first game, with more natural lighting and volumetric smoke wafting from chimney stacks.
By far the most notable difference, however, is one that you choose yourself – your city’s theme. Skylines II lets you pick between American or European themes your for your settlement, with each dramatically affecting the architecture, signage, road networks and vehicle types you’ll see around the city. You can also switch between the two themes at any time, building different parts of your city with contrasting architectural styles (although your road network will remain consistent with its initial format) “You could build a European to
