I played on: PS4
I paid: £20.99 (PS Store)
Available on: PS4
Notes: I have already reviewed the PC version of this game, click here to read it.
Now Cities Skylines on the PC is easily one of my favourite games of all time. Is it as good on the PS4 however?
The idea here is simple and works like most city builders including the amazing Sim City series. You start off with a small amount of money and have to build a city that functions well, keeps people happy while staying in the green. Building roads will allow you to map out your city before you zone the areas around your roads. The larger the road the more space to zone however your roads will need to allow emergency and other service vehicles quick and clear access. If you don’t then buildings will burn down or be abandoned losing you money and dropping the land value. Managing policies, placement of service buildings and taxes are just a few tools you have to prevent this from happening. Parks and unique buildings will keep citizens happy while public transport like buses and trains will allow them to quickly and easily move around once things expand. It’s all about balance and it’s your job as mayor to keep this balance maintained. I found I fell in love with my city when I introduced both a passenger and cargo rail service. Following my trains round watching people move about my city felt great and I was very proud of my creation. The gameplay is certainly good, but it’s not perfect.
On the PC version, Steam Workshop support is included from the main menu meaning installing and managing mods is simple and impressively easy. The PS4 version lacks any mod support and this hurts the game. Any issues you had on PC could be easily solved within a few minutes with the use of a mod or two but here they remain. It’s not a major issue because none of the problems is major themselves, just small things that you start to notice after hours of play. If a building is unable to function it will be abandoned leaving you to bulldoze each one of individually. You’re unable to enter a first-person view to walk around your city and see it from the point of view of a citizen. The same buildings will start to be repeated over and over which makes the graphics feel less impressive. If you only play this game for an hour or so at a time I doubt you will notice any of these however when you play for 5 or so hours at a time like myself they start to feel really annoying. This is what mods were great for on the PC version, fixing these minor issues and not having these mods definitely makes this the inferior version of the game.
The controls work pretty well for the most part with the PS4 controller. Although little things like being able to change the colour of public transport vehicles or the amount of them on individual lines are missing here. This gets annoying when you want something like an express line from your Airport to your city and the game creates 4 trains when all you need is 2. Then you have the extra trains just creating delays for your other services.
The presentation is beautiful and with my old laptop not being able to run the game above low settings it was nice to be able to play with mid to high graphics. Now I have a more impressive machine this is less of an issue for me but it's one other people have so it's worth keeping in mind. Audio is also once again outstanding with great sounding city noises and a very calming ambient score.
I will admit the PS4 Edition is not as good as the PC version mostly down to the lacking of mod support and the control setup. Please be aware however when I say inferior I do not mean bad because it’s far from that. It’s still a great game that I can lose hours to without even noticing but unlike the PC version, it’s far from flawless.
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