Cities: Skylines - After Dark Patch & Expansion Released, Some Initial Thoughts

Cities: Skylines was already a pretty big game, and now it is simply huge thanks to a big free patch and the first expansion.

Launch trailer:

You can see the full notes of what’s free, and what’s left in for the expansion right here. I think their commitment to the game is fantastic, and the free updates will hopefully continue too.

Some thoughts
I’ve played quite a few hours in the game, and I simply love it. This expansion makes me love it even more.

The addition of a day/night cycle makes for some interesting looking cities, as they beautifully light up at night and put you in awe of your own creations. It does however give solar energy a bit of a drawback, so don’t go relying on it like our Samsai did.

I didn’t quite understand when it would become night time at first, but on the lower left corner the world icon now has the sun moving around on it to indicate the time of day. It’s done in a weird way, but I understand why they did it. Instead of there being a true day/night cycle it goes through days at a time being in the light, and then days of it being night. Otherwise day and night would come and go in the blink of an eye and it wouldn’t be great.

I think my favourite part about the night cycle is seeing Wind Turbines lit up with spotlights from the bottom, it looks so awesome and it’s such a simple thing.

The new dynamic lighting system is great too, as you see your city slowly creep into the shadows and lights flicker on. I find myself quickly zooming in and out on all sections of my city, simply to stare at all the detail at night time.



As for new buildings and services: amongst other things you now need prisons! As those dastardly criminals love to come out at night. I did wonder what the police did with people before, it seems they weren’t trained very well and just sent them on their way with a pat on their back—no more!

It expands on almost everything! It’s not going to drastically change the way you play the game, but it adds lots of extra kit to keep you coming back to play it even more.

I think it’s fantastic, and I still have a very firm belief that I should not be allowed to run a city, ever. I’m constantly out of money, I think residents should be fine lighting candles to cook their dinner with no electricity, and why is running water such a necessity?

One thing they do need to tweak now are the messages from your citizens, as I had someone tweet “good morning, what a beautiful sunrise” in the middle of the night. Amusing, and a very minor issue, but something that would be nice to see ironed out eventually. I can’t imagine that being hard to fix though.

Considering the amount of possible city variations you can do, especially now with the new buildings I think the price is very reasonable too.

Check out Cities: Skylines on Steam here, and After Dark right here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.