Building a city can be difficult. Nobody expects you to succeed in this already lively world packed to the brim with popular and famous cities. It won't be easy, you'll need to start small and work your way up, but if you plan ahead, budget popular, and take care of those who enter to call your city home, good things will come in time.

Let's start from the beginning. You’re thrown into the chaos of financial and structural management immediately, with no tutorial missions or levels. But that's fine because it won't take longer for you to get into the game and it's mechanics. Cities: Skylines is developer Colossal Order’s first meaningful foray into the genre. A developer better known for their transportation simulation games with the Cities in Motion series, one would think that a city-building simulation game is a pretty natural progression. One would be exactly right in thinking this as Cities: Skylines is magnificent. There’s no point trying to hide it, because it just is. Cities: Skylines is just how a city-building simulator should be. If you despised SimCity for its tiny scale, this is not a tiny game. Skylines begins small, but as your city grows, you're able to unlock more and more of the surrounding countryside. It gets to the point where you can start building satellite communities just for the hell of it, because your primary city is so damn big.

Now I don’t want to give people the impression that Cities: Skylines is re-inventing the wheel for the city-building genre. If anything, they are merely improving and tweaking the wheel to fit modern standards so that we are no longer consigned to playing games made more than a decade ago for a good city-building sim.

One of these things is the fact that the amount of land your city encompasses isn’t just limited to the 2km x 2km square that you start with. You get to “buy” more adjacent land tiles to eventually encompass 36 square kilometers of land, and that’s without mods that can bring it up to 25 tiles or 100 square kilometers. Another interesting thing they’ve done is uncouple the idea of commercial and office buildings. Commercial buildings are like shops, departments stores and cinemas, which historically was jumbled up with office buildings. Now they are two separate things, thus allowing you, the player, a lot more freedom when it comes to deciding how your city will be laid out. Speaking of districts, that’s also another pretty cool feature that Cities: Skylines brings to the table. You can now draw out what constitutes a district and actually give it a name.

Cities: Skylines also does a good job of pacing the development of your town, Most things will be locked and unavailable to build in your town until certain milestones, usually populations size, are met. This is good on many levels as it prevents you from over-investing in infrastructure and services that you can barely afford as it is.

Then there are some features that are missing that one would probably expect or highly desire in a city-building sim like a day and night cycle. Say what you want about the 2013 SimCity, but it was pretty cool to watch streetlights go on and off and your sims go about their daily businesses and participate in rush hours.

Cities: Skylines is how city-building games ought to be. It’s fun, it’s pretty, it’s easily approachable, yet, difficult to master. It doesn’t have all the features that one might dream of in the perfect city-building simulator like a day-night cycle or swathes of data and statistics to comb through when optimizing your city, but it does absolute wonders with the features it does have.