Cities: Skylines - Snowfall Review (PC)

Snowfall is the second expansion for the popular Cities: Skylines, and the entire experience is built around the winter season and the unique gameplay opportunities and challenges that are associated with it.

Despite its new theme, the game quickly made me remember how much I hated landfills and allowed me to extend my irrational feelings towards the new snow dumps.

The reason is simple: because of my own subconscious expectations about city builders (I have been playing them since the Sim City 2000) and the way game mechanics interact, I always tend to put both of those structures on the edges of my neighborhoods. This, in turn, means that I need to create a finely crafted road network to make sure that their trucks move efficiently through the city.

Which is easy to do when a settlement has a few thousand people, and there are just a few services that a mayor needs to provide. However, it gets exponentially harder as players head towards 70,000 citizens, and each city overflows with traffic.

Snowfall delivers plenty of interesting variety while also expanding some of the mid-game mechanics, but I tend to abandon games when I get to the stage where I can only tweak already-created areas, and the expansion does not address that in any way.

This second content drop for Cities: Skylines is developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, offered at the moment on the PC, with plans to bring it and the base game to the Xbox One during 2016.

Story

Cities: Skylines - Snowfall is all about winter and the ways in which it forces the intelligent virtual mayor to find methods of dealing with both the cold that it brings and the extensive amounts of frozen precipitation that it delivers onto roads.

The season, as imagined by the video game, is both beautiful and brutal, with temperatures that often dip below freezing point and with a level of precipitations that would probably break records if they fell in the real world.

Despite the fanfare and celebratory screens that pop up when certain population thresholds are reached, Cities: Skylines does not have an actual narrative thread, although it's certainly possible for gamers to create their stories around the major events and crises of their city.

Cities: Skylines - Snowfall landmark

Mine would involve horror tales about bodies left in apartments instead of being driven to cemeteries, and garbage left uncollected, all balanced out by incredible parks, a good equilibrium between industry, commerce and habitation, and care for the environment.

In terms of writing, gamers can also enjoy more message status updates from Chirpy if they have not already turned and chosen to find out more about their city by clicking on both inhabitants and buildings.

Gameplay

Cities: Skylines - Snowfall wants players to find the best possible way to create a thriving city while also discovering how to express their personality in the patterns they choose, the road networks that they create, and the how they use cosmetic options to make their creations look good to outsiders.

There are three basic types of buildings - residential, commercial and industrial - and a wide range of utilities, services and extra luxuries that can be used to deliver extra growth both regarding population and revenue derived from a metropolis.

As a city evolves, new lots of land can be purchased and developed, a transportation system needs to be introduced, special buildings are unlocked to spruce up neighborhoods, and finally, monuments appear to celebrate a truly well-rounded urban space.

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The introduction of winter in Snowfall makes changes to some of the core mechanics of Skylines without adding anything truly revolutionary to the formula, with gamers now asked to deal with the effects of both snow and chilly weather.

Snow will make it harder for vehicles to move around a city, which means players need to keep snow plows running around the clock and be even more careful when creating high traffic avenues or bottlenecks.

Road maintenance centers are a way to make traffic flow faster than in the base game as long as the player can adequately cover their city, but it feels slightly unrealistic, a concession made by Colossal Order to those who have been complaining about overload on the roads.

The tram system adds another tool for gamers who want to improve efficiency when it comes to transport, with a focus on the most developed and crowded areas in the inner city, where the increased capacity and the fact that traffic does not affect them makes them invaluable.

Trams also cost more and require re-laid roads in some areas, which means that they are not a universal solution, but they are a great addition to Skylines and make its transportation system more fun to tweak.

Cold is another winter weather feature, and gamers can choose to deal with it by using more electricity to heat homes and offices but also by building dedicated steam pipes and placing new structures.

I found that it is better to simply ignore this area of the expansion and generate enough electricity to make sure that the cold is not a problem at night, even if this leads to a higher number of off-shore windmills than normal.

“The changes brought about by Snowfall are fun to explore, and the new season poses unique problems, but once a city has been built up to some extent, Cities: Skylines once again becomes all about tweaking, with a major focus on managing the road network.”

It's all challenging and fun for a few hours, but it can get tedious after that, and I suspect most players will just start new cities and try out new ideas rather than constantly fiddle with already existing ones to push for higher populations and more landmarks.

Cities: Skylines is also getting a free update alongside the most recent expansion, which introduces new cosmetic effects for all maps as well as themes that modders can use to allow players to create settlements that seem to inhabit worlds other than Earth.

The city building title from Colossal Order has the support of a solid community of players, and that means the new features introduced in Snowfall will lead to better and more interesting fan-made creations.

Graphics and audio

Cities: Skylines - Snowfall boasts some unique maps set during the cold season that feature exquisite environments and effects, allowing the player to engage with a snow-covered world while looking at the Aurora Borealis in the night sky.

The scenery offers plenty of variety when compared to both the cities of the base release and the European style maps that were delivered after launch, and the alpine look associated with the expansion looks great and offers interesting takes on already-existing city environments.

The visual impact is not as big as for After Dark, but there are some moments when first engaging with Snowfall when my focus on gameplay drifted away as I zoomed in and out to see how the buildings and roads look with the new theme.

But in true city builder veteran style, I use the most zoomed-out look for most of the time to have a clear picture of what's happening in the settlement I manage, with plenty of help offered by the various layers that the development team has integrated.

From high up, the sounds of Cities: Skylines - Snowfall tend to have a limited impact on enjoyment, but the developers have managed to replicate the sounds of a bustling city in a convincing way, and the soundtrack is also good at adding atmosphere to the experience.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion