Last week at Gamescom, I was invited by Paradox Interactive to check out its new city builder, LEGO Skylines, which I had no idea about by the time I reached the booth. I went in completely blind, expecting nothing, but I left with a very positive vibe and the thought that this might very well bridge the gap between The Sims and Cities Skylines for a more casual audience.
The game unfolds in much the same way as Cities Skylines: you get a plot of land, and you start building. However, instead of laying down massive industrial, commercial, and residential zones and watching your town build itself out of your layout, in LEGO Skylines everything—and I truly mean everything—is done by hand.
You plot down every single building yourself, choosing from an incredible variety of styles and looks, all while striving to fulfill your citizens’ needs. And not only do citizens have needs; every single building, depending on its type, has its own set of needs and wants, and you will have to go out of your way to constantly meet them. Shops need specific billboards, citizens want different varieties of gardens, and so on.
In that sense, this is a deeply personal game. You have a much smaller population size compared to Cities Skylines, and with the game’s heavy narrative side, which I will write more about in my conversation with the developers, you start to really meet your citizens and deliver on their requirements to ensure your community’s continued growth.
With the game moving from broad strokes to the minutiae, this allows for a much more focused and controlled environment, one where you as the mayor will have the utmost control over every single part of your town.
And that means incredible levels of customizability. Every building or prop you place has individual customization, where you can not only change the color scheme, but also add new props and stylization elements that can fundamentally alter the buildings’ looks.
This, of course, scales up, and you’ll eventually reach a point where you’ve got a massive, sprawling city where you know each citizen’s name and have played a hand in how every single office space looks.
It is truly unbridled creativity packed in a wonderful little game, one I hope will bridge the gap between players of The Sims and Cities Skylines, as I’m fairly confident there is a fine line somewhere between them that neither ever dared to cross.
I only got to play for some ~45 minutes, seeing the early game and how you can start from scratch and meet all sorts of cool characters who give you missions, but also getting a glimpse into the very late game where your ~2,500 pops will be enough to fuel a metropolis-sized city.
This is not least because the buildings and props are massive and exceptionally detailed, much more so than anything I had ever seen in a Cities game, so even with a small pop size you really take up a lot of space and get the sense of a sprawling city.
It’s a very beautiful game, and I hope it finds the more casual, laid-back audience that it deserves.
