Cities Skylines fails miserably at what it sets out to do, but has a hidden strength that very few other games do.
It's a terrible city management game. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Awful. Every essential part of a city's infrastructure is hidden behind arbitrary population headcounts, there are no options for proper mixed-use zoning, traffic control is pointless without mods (which only alleviate the problem), public transit requires a hefty DLC price tag instead of being something the game was built around, and there's no nuance whatsoever to local politics. Strikes and riots and protests are entirely absent, crime is a simple correlation between education and available jobs (which are two major contributing factors to crime, sure, but it's hardly just that), and there are no ways to control supply chains in the Industries DLC (also known as the State Capitalism DLC by people who like proper labels).

So what is it good at? Surprisingly, it's really good at showing how cities can evolve over time, how destructive highway- and car-centric policies are to communities, and why we have agencies like the EPA and OSHA in the real world. Of course, you need Road Anarchy and Prop Anarchy along with the endless font of incredible assets coming out of the community to make the city you're working on look nice (or if not "nice," at least realistic), but it's kind of a given these days that modders do at least half the work of most developers.

Get it on sale if you want it, but don't expect it to be the answer to your city management sim prayers. If you were hoping to use this as a teaching or educational aid in any capacity, my suggestion is to just put the money toward the book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Chuck Marohn and check out currently-existing Cities Skylines series on YT such as donoteat01's Power, Planning, & Politics series.

The last time I wrote a review for this game I was pretty agitated about what the developer did. I felt it needed a calmer and more specific, though in no way exhaustive, airing of grievances to provide some context to the outburst last time. So here we go.



The developers of Planetside 2, sequel to notorious MMOFPS Planetside and sister product to the somewhat less notorious and more well-regarded EverQuest series, have gone by a few names. As of time of writing, they're called "Rogue Planet Games." Before this, they were Daybreak Studios. Before that, they were Sony Online Entertainment. It doesn't really matter.

Here's the thing, right. Rogue Break Online Entertainment Studio Planets knows as much about game balance and what its community wants and needs to reverse a persistent decline as it does about:

• tank design
• ballistics
• politics
• socioeconomic factors behind recruitment drives in wartime
• military civics
• Autism Spectrum Disorder
• multi-domain battlespaces
• camouflage efficacy
• logistics and supply chains
• tactical considerations in open terrain or urban environments
• combined arms doctrines of the mid-Cold War era
• how to code NPCs
• how to classify NPCs (typically you don't call a box atop a tower that you have to hold E on a "character", but honestly it's got the same level of scripting and personality as a gussied-up player model with the title of "field commander" floating over its head, so we'll give that a pass),
• history
• storywriting (this one wasn't always the case)
• the concept of a thought crime
• business and labor ethics
• how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop

In other words, they don't know ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about game design or balance.

The part that hurts is that at some point they did. Planetside 2 used to be an incredible experience, a very unique and memorable beast, even in spite of its flaws -- which at the time largely consisted of netcode that makes quantum spaghetti look sensible -- but the fall from grace has been a hard one to say the least. There's a very good reason the playerbase is at an all-time low, in spite of active attempts to draw new blood in. I don't know how you manage to consistently ♥♥♥♥ it up when you're one of the few developers doing the whole "massive FPS battles" thing, but here's an example: the decision (as of this time of writing) to remove the ability of an entire player class to be revived by medics, eleven ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years after the initial release of the game. An entire player class, specifically designed from the outset for the purpose of preventing long stalemates by helping to break a heavily entrenched opponent on either the defense or the attack. A player class that requires a massive investment of XP (called "certs" in this game's parlance, short for "certification points," because that's the most creative they were able to get with their pseudo-military theming) in order to specialize into fighting either infantry, armor, or air with any degree of effectiveness, which has been persistently nerfed over the course of the game along with aircraft and vehicles. A class which can't be healed by Medics and already had effective counters in the form of anti-material rifles and anti-tank mines.

The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ didn't even refund anyone's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ certs in the process.


While games like Squad and ARMA can't match the sheer number of players per battle in purely technical terms, you'd be hard pressed to find more people in a single fight (at least one that isn't a cert-grinding bunker camping trip dead center of whichever singular map is currently active) than you'd find in any of a dozen mid-size ARMA servers, and this game doesn't even have the level of attention to ballistics, modding potential, or depth of strategy and tactics that those games have. Grenades are a kitten fart with an injury radius of about five meters, artillery doesn't exist in any practical sense, vehicles have literally no stabilization on the move, and aircraft have about the same flight characteristics of a space shuttle with a missing O-ring. It's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke.

♥♥♥♥ like this, in conjunction with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ corporations like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft and Activision pull on a yearly basis, makes it really hard to view the videogame industry as anything more than the rotting husk of a mythical Titan, and it feels as though entropy manifests itself as the unmitigated stupidity of software developers who are absurdly tone-deaf at best and actively self-sabotaging at worst in a world where software rollbacks are considered anathema to wringing that last bit of sweet, sweet moolah from an ever-shrinking userbase.


PS2 can still be fun with a coordinated squad and a handful of beers or joints, but overall I'd recommend just skipping it over at this point.



P.S.: While it's technically a free game, I've given these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way too much of my money over the eleven years of its existence to justify checking that box. I've purchased overpriced Deluxe Editions of AAA games for less than I've given the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at Sonybreak Onplanet Studigames.