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I’ve always found Cities: Skylines a little bit overwhelming. The style, introduction, and sheer depth of its management is a lot. When Lego Skylines was revealed, I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t just be Cities with a more colorful skin. Thankfully, Iceflake Studios has made its new game more welcoming, without completely abandoning the depth the series is known for.
The key thing here is that it doesn’t feel like you’re thrown in at the deep end. Once the career mode introduces you to a family who moves into the area looking for a home, you’re gradually taught how the main Lego Skylines mechanics work, and how to build a functional town.
Things start small. You’re tasked with building a few houses, connecting them with roads, and adding some shops for people to frequent. Progression follows a sequence of requests from citizens. They’ll be asking for certain things around their homes, some decoration maybe, and you’ll learn how to manage a city as part of it. It’s a much more natural way to introduce players to a management game, without overwhelming them too quickly.
A lot of what you do early on is addressing ‘appeal’ needs. Every single inhabitant of your blossoming town has particular desires, and wants their home to have a certain aesthetic. They might want more nature around them, formal decoration, or more a historical design, and you need to add items to the area to keep them happy.
This underlines Lego Skylines’ focus on aesthetics. It’s a gorgeous game, and everything is geared to making the world look good. The houses are constructed brick by brick at super speed, and characters wander around with that whimsy that Lego is synonymous with. There’s an all-encompassing friendly tone to the game, which adds to the fact that it’s more welcoming. The developers even said that everything you build in the game is something you could build in real life with the same blocks the game uses. It’s stylish, authentic, and lovely to look at.
Once you get used to the focus on style and appeal, Lego Skylines begins to introduce the classic city management features. Water, power, waste, and other city staples are important here, too; you’re not just slapping down loads of houses on a field. Thankfully, ensuring those resources are functional is pretty easy, at least in a smaller town.
My first town was a bit of a mess. Since the inhabitants wanted such different decorations around their houses, the place was a mismatch of different themes. A house surrounded by foliage was next to one engulfed by statues and stone; it looked odd. As you develop an understanding of how to efficiently hit the appeal demands, you’ll start to consider how to design your city’s layout on a larger scale. You can think about areas by theme, or how to keep people happy without the solution overwhelming the surrounding area. Once the basic mechanics are second nature, you can start to dive into the game’s focus on aesthetics.
To see how all that looked on a large scale, the last few minutes of my preview session took me to a massive city that the development team had put together. It had distinct districts, a huge downtown area, bridges across rivers to new islands, and loads of people milling about, going about their daily lives. It showed me that Lego Skylines still has the depth that’s core to the series. My initial reaction was “yeah, I’d never be able to do that,” but I think it’s more achievable than in vanilla Cities: Skylines.
While the start of the game is more welcoming and there’s a real tutorial, that shouldn’t scare off Cities experts if they’re looking for something with a different tone. There should be more than enough for them here, while ensuring that the game is one that new players will feel comfortable with. I think Iceflake Studios has got that balance right.
I’m also excited to see how they handle another core aspect of Lego: IPs. There’s barely a single IP in the world that hasn’t been Lego-ified at some point, and the Skylines devs told me that they have full use of the IPs Lego has used, and that they’re excited to make use of them in the near future.
I think it’s smart to focus on getting the game right first, without letting it drown in IP stuff. We don’t need a Gringotts Bank or Arkham Asylum from the start, but they’ll be more than welcome as updates in the coming months and years.
Whether familiar IPs are featured or not, Lego Skylines is a smart sideways move for the Cities series. It’ll bring in a whole host of new players to the city management series, without scaring off the dedicated fan base. It’s cute, cozy, and still deep – what’s not to love?
