Cities Skylines: Remastered – Review

I’ve been a fan of city building games since the original Sim City back in 1989 and while EA’s popular franchise eventually died with the failed reboot in 2013, it was that which persuaded Paradox Interactive to greenlight the new city builder from developers Colossal Order.

Unlike other games which focused on areas such as trade, competitive nations or politics, Cities Skylines wanted to stick to what made the genre so popular in the first place, offering a fun and engrossing game about building cities.
The original launched on PC back in 2015, with the Xbox One version arriving in 2017, but here we are almost 6 years later with the next-gen “Cities Skylines: Remastered”.

It’s worth pointing out, over the last 6 years, the original Cities Skylines has evolved quite a bit, there’s been 11 major DLC’s released, with each accompanied by major free updates which have added new content and features to the base game, so if you checked out Cities Skylines many years ago, there’s a strong chance that what you’ll find in Cities Skylines: Remastered is a whole new world.

I personally own the Mayors Edition which features 6 of those major DLC’s and have recently added a few more packs, so I’m used to playing quite a packed version of the game, and while at launch CS: Remastered will support the first 10 (up to and including Airports – with the latest “Plaza’s and Promenades” DLC expecting in the coming months), My pre-release review code, was just the vanilla game, of Cities Skylines with the After Dark DLC (the same as the base Xbox One Edition).

For anyone who’s never played Sim City or Cities Skylines, you might be wondering exactly what I’m talking about, so imagine a large plot of land, with the task to build a large city, you start off with a few small roads, and then add a few residential, commercial and industrial areas, making sure they have sufficient electricity and water, before expanding to larger areas.
It’s every bit as simple as it sounds, but you’ll soon be tweaking the finer workings of a busy city if you want to expand to become a large metropolis.

Roads are usually a great place to start, and a simple square will see a clear grid appear around the roads you’ve placed, you can then select which zone you’d like to use, for instance Green – Residential, and houses will start automatically being build in the designated area.

As you expand your city, you’ll start getting pop-up bubbles, showing what you need to address, that trash can means you’ll need to build a tip nearby, but if you put it too close to a residential area you’ll soon have residents complaining about the noise and smell or falling ill.

There’s then services, such as police, fire station, hospitals and schools, all of which will have a positive or negative impact on your surrounding areas, keep growing and the number of happy residents will increase, but we all know you can’t please everybody, so those Karens complaining about the nearby roads will start making more noise too.

With the Remastered version, one of the major highlights is having the ability to make your cities even larger, originally, there was a 25 tile limit, and you could buy and build on 9 of those, now with the remaster, you can access, buy and build on every single tile, meaning your cities can be almost 3 times the size (and anyone who built even 4-5 tile city, will know exactly how big that is, we’re talking about almost 100 square kilometres (over 60 square miles).

While this was possible on high-end PC’s with some very specific mods, to have this available directly on consoles is a BIG improvement, not only allowing large single cities, but also massive communities, over multiple smaller towns and cities within a single map.

Another addition to the remastered version is the opportunity to create your own maps, you’re given a flat stretch of land covering the entire 25 titles, and as long as you have 4 roads leading from the edge of the visible map to those 25 titles, you’re free to create any shape or terrain you wish.
While there’s a wide range of maps available regardless, having the chance to create your own on console provides endless options, fancy a large barren desert, that’s fine, how a bay, or a collection of islands that rely on an intelligent road network to link them all together.

You’re not limited by just the terrain as you can place water sources if you fancy creating a waterfall, and there’s plenty of extra scenery options from abandoned factories to stone-henge style rocks that can give your creation some personality.

The map creation system did take me five minutes to get used to, but before long I was able to create whatever hills, mountains, cliffs, and landscape I could imagine making city creation in the main game as complicated as I wanted.

There’s also been the expected graphical improvements, cities look sharper and more detailed, the user interface (UX) has had an update and feels fresher, with a more simple front-end, and there’s also the addition of a new quick select tool.

There’s a noticeable pop-in for building textures if you suddenly zoom all the way in, but we’re talking about a transition from seeing an overview of about 6 full tiles, to zooming in to street level so having a few roof plants and cladding textures pop-in is more than acceptable, when it’s otherwise seamless, with no stutters and the actual game remains smooth, even with a large city packed with over a hundred thousand occupants.

There’s no way older consoles could cope with this much going on, and titles like Planet Coaster (and their notorious limitations) really continue to highlight how well Paradox and Colossal Order have done with this remaster.

The impressive performance continues, with the sound already at a high level, while working on your city, there’s a wide variety of music, and while some additional music packs will cost, these are still good value, when you’re usually adding a new “Station” with a 16 tracks, for a small additional fee (about £3).
It’s also worth revisiting the DLC available for Cities Skylines, because there’s ALOT. from radio packs, content packs, map packs and DLC’s, it’s sometimes a little confusing to know what’s what,
There are Season Pass 1, Season Pass 2 and 3 (known as the Cities Expansion Bundle), which for about £30 each give you a selection of each of the aforementioned packs, but it’s important to emphasise, NONE of these are essential,
sure, I think certain packs are a great addition, but going from playing Cities Skylines with the first two season Passes, back to this “Vanilla” experience, didn’t feel like I was missing out on major features (they were all added for free alongside the release of these major DLC’s), so while I’m sure those who really enjoy the game will happily start to add a few of the DLC packs, people who don’t aren’t at a major loss.

The overall improvements to presentation are noticeable, but not as much as the map size increase and the User interface, mostly because they were already at such a high standard.

Value might be an important factor, so releasing the Remastered version at £34.99 is a great price, but Game Pass users will find that added to the service on day 1, and existing owners of “Cities Skylines Xbox One Ediiton” will find they get the remastered upgrade completely free of charge.
With the free upgrade and Game Pass already boosting the value, even external to that, getting such a large, impressive and immersive game for £35 is fantastic value in itself.

Cities Skylines was already one of the best City Builders available, but the remaster is the cherry on top, everything is that little bit better.
Newcomers will find a massive immersive game that’s been careful crafted over the last 8 years, to what is very much a next-gen title at an unbeatable price and returning fans are going to see their favourite city builder, just got even better. compatible with an impressive 10 of the total 11 DLC’s available at launch, even the most avid supporters won’t feel like they’re missing much and that latest Plaza’s and Promenade’s DLC will surely be added before you’ve even started to explore those expanded 25 titles.

If you’re even just a small fan of strategy, simulation or city-builders you probably already own City skylines and can look forward to the free Remastered version, if you don’t it’s a must buy because it’s the perfect addition to your collection.

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