Playing In The Freezing Snow Of Cities: Skylines – Snowfall

The simple and pure pleasure of building and managing your cities was at the heart of Cities: Skylines at launch, as Colossal Order aimed to get the fundamentals right in a genre that had long been neglected. The first two expansions have proceeded to give a lot more variety and change to the environment in which your city exists, first by adding a day-night cycle in After Dark, and now pitting you against the elements in Snowfall.

Where the rising and the setting of the sun were universally applicable, Snowfall and its new gameplay is tied to the winter theme, with three maps included – though you can be sure to see plenty more made by fans in the Steam Workshop. It covers every aspect of the visual style of the game, with all the buildings now blanketed in snow, cars driving around with a dusting of the white stuff, new citizen character models in wintery gear, and even the much “beloved” Chirper has a new hat on and a few new things to say.

As the snow reaches near blizzard proportions at various times, it soon becomes clear that your new city is going to have to deal with it in order to keep running. Roads will gradually get whiter and whiter, before an icon pops up to say that it’s seriously covered. You’ll soon have to dig into the road laying menu to find the Snow Dump, and send out snowploughs to collect it up and take it back for melting later on. It’s not as visually arresting as the more dramatic images we see from the real world, of ploughs carving a path through banks of snow, but it’s a nice thematic addition.

The actual temperature is something that you’ll need to pay closer attention to as you play. In addition to the raised electricity requirements at night, the temperature will fluctuate quite noticeably, and that will have the city clamouring for more energy to keep warm. It’s easy to quickly find yourself overwhelmed by this, having to buy more sources of power to give yourself a larger buffer zone, but there is an alternative.

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The new city ordinances and policies that you can apply include things like mandating spiked tyres and shoes for your residents, or requiring all buildings to have plenty of insulation, albeit at a cost to the city coffers. That policy works well in tandem with the new ability to pipe hot water alongside your regular fresh and waste water infrastructure.

Whether by leaning on the polluting boiler station or on geothermal heating plants for your heat – both are roughly the same price – you can pump hot water to your city and cut down on electricity usage. You do need to upgrade the pipe network, which is a very expensive process, but it seems to be worth it, even if you only supply this utility to certain parts of the city.

Unfortunately, I fouled it up when trying to upgrade my pipelines, mistakenly thinking that everything was hooked up, when it wasn’t. You can imagine my confusion when I told Nord Westfallen – the northerly part of my newly founded city – to stop using electricity for heat, and everyone complained of being cold. It wasn’t until people had moved out in their hundreds that I spotted my mistake, amidst the clutter of roads and buildings.

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That’s something to bear in mind as you play, because it’s still very easy to stumble if you’re not paying attention. It’s not particularly difficult to keep your books balanced, and that makes it very easy to save up and then go and splash out on a big new area for your city, but while your back is turned, everything can go to pot. It turns out that this new town has pushed you over the edge with your power grid, you need to suck up more water from the river, the traffic jams at your main motorway access point have only got worse… It’s all part of the joy and pain of being a city builder.

Snow and a poor road network aren’t the only thing that can affect your traffic problems, though. Tucked away alongside the snow dump, you’ll also be able to build a road maintenance service, which will head out onto the roads and speed things up, allowing cars to move that little bit faster. There’s only upsides to this, as failing to maintain the roads doesn’t punish you.

You’ve also got another option to choose from when it comes to getting people out of their cars and into public transport. Trams have finally been added to the game, and give you another alternative to running a train or metro network, while having the advantage of being able to blend with traffic like busses. Whatever you choose, a new public transport view allows you to more easily analyse how your network is doing, which is important when there can be a number of overlapping lines and systems.

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As is Paradox Interactive’s tradition, this paid content comes alongside a patch with a number of features for free. There’s the aforementioned public transport information panels, and though you won’t get snow, there will be cosmetic fog and rain for those with only the main game, and you’ll still be able to see how hot or cold it is. Best of all, they’re adding a new theme editor for modders to create new environments for your cities, with potentially otherworldly results.

Truthfully, the only thing that really seems to be missing from Snowfall is for the snow to melt and the seasons to cycle. With the number of new things to try and juggle and figure out, alongside everything from the main game and After Dark, I could have done with a little respite from peering through the blizzards. Regardless, Snowfall is another intriguing expansion from Colossal Order, which blends eyecatching new visuals which come alongside some clever new ideas and additions to how the game plays

1 Comment

  1. I like games like this but don’t have the time to play them so I’ll give it a miss for now.

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