Once you’ve connected the electric, fitted the pipes, and slapped down a bunch of industry, commercial, and residential areas. The game does its best to coax you into its mechanics and early on, offering helpful hints, throwing up emoticons to represent whatever fresh hell your townsfolk are unhappy about, and holding back on certain things until you’ve grown a touch more comfortable managing your humble hamlet into bustling boulevards. Ignorance hurts growth and long-term progress, who’d have thunk it? Almost as much as seeing a city thrive, but there’s always a sense of quiet despair seeing your hopes and dreams for a plucky young city torn to shreds because you neglected to use logic once, or failed to read a simple info blurb. Luckily, I quite enjoyed the thrill of starting from scratch in Cities. I fumbled to fix the damage, but alas, there was no saving a good chunk of the population of Punkerton, and I vowed to not make the same mistakes again.

I ended up with a citywide epidemic of sickness and death via crap-flavored water and cream of death air. Unfortunately I’d built my pipework outlets in completely the wrong place, and put too much housing a bit too close to the chugging smoke of an industrial district. I was growing fast, and I was rather pleased with myself. In my first proper go at a city (meaning the one where I didn’t blow the budget in ten minutes and completely ruin the lives of every poor soul who decided my town of nothing was the hip new place to stay), I’d crafted a lovely town by the river, laid out pretty roadwork patterns, slowly built my population up to a decent level by designating roadside sections the corresponding color for residential areas, and followed suit with a healthy shot of industry and commerce to help this community thrive. Admirable work it may be, but the tiniest oversight can make a huge difference between a prosperous city and a flaming fecal graveyard.

Despite the various menus, and submenus being mapped rather well to the Dualshock 4, and a neater, cleaner redesign of the UI, there’s just so much of it to learn that it can be a struggle to remember everything the game tells you, more so if you don’t catch that a click of the right stick on any highlighted item brings up useful info for it. That’s not to say it isn’t still initially a tad overwhelming to comprehend. It’s why we’ve seen the likes of XCOM, Wasteland 2, Diablo III, and Divinity: Original Sin make the jump in an impressive manner in recent years, and Cities: Skylines is another. It should be no surprise in this modern gaming environment, more and more titles considered to be previously ‘difficult to translate’ to a controller, find themselves slotting comfortably into the world of consoles thanks to smart work by developers.

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