There’s really not that many city builders and their ilk on console, with only a handful of examples springing to mind. You’ve got Tropico 5 for one, Prison Architect for another and, well, after that I’m a bit stuck. However, having announced back in 2015, the Xbox One port of Cities: Skylines is very nearly ready for release on April 21st and we got to have a little hands on look at it in action at EGX Rezzed.
Most importantly, this is Cities: Skylines with no content cut from the game on PC. Layout of your city is a doddle, all of the systems work the same, the graphics match up well; the familiar best-in-class city building game is right here for you to dig into. However, going from mouse and keyboard to a gamepad means you need to redesign the user interface completely, and Tantalus Media, who were entrusted with the port, have done a pretty great job of it.
There’s one or two little quirks and things in slightly unexpected places, like the inspector being a thing that needs to exist when you can’t just click on something with a mouse to bring up info on it, or how you can’t change the type of road placement from straight to curved or freeform while actually placing a road, which just needs players like me to make a tiny leap to get over the mental block.
The whole user interface has also been changed so that it’s big enough to work from a distance on TV. The budget panel takes up the whole screen, for example, and while it looks a bit too kiddy when sat up close, again, it does an admirable job of making sure everything in the PC game is at your fingertips on console.
In terms of overall content, yes, this is the base game, but it also comes with the first expansion pack, After Dark, which adds a day-night cycle and gameplay surrounding the nightlife, such as a higher criminal activity, more electricity usage, and the need to rebalance the budget for all of this. The plan is to have this as a solid baseline for the game before adding to it with later expansions that are already out on PC. It’s a slight shame you don’t get Natural Disasters on day one, for example, but it’s also good to walk before you try to run.
If I had two wishes for the game, it would be that the free cursor was just ever so slightly stickier when auto-targetting the roads, especially when placing things like bus stops, but that’s just getting used to the way the game handles.
A bigger point is that there’s no way to speed up time, only a way pause it. Cities Skylines is a game that I often play with the speed ramped up, just letting my city tick over for my latest grand design to be populated by people building new houses, businesses and so on. That’s missing on Xbox One, and I feel it might be down to the lacking power of the CPUs in modern consoles – don’t start crowing about how powerful the PS4 is, because its CPU is just as underpowered. It’s just that it’s going to make the game really very slow when you first start out building your city.
Overall though this is a fine looking port of one of, if not the best city building game out there, and in true Paradox Interactive style, it’s one that will only get better over time, as it’s updated and as new expansions are rolled out for it.
