
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.
