Skid Cities Preview

What do you get when you mix Cities Skylines and Cyberpunk 2077? The answer is Skid Cities and it is available on Steam Early Access right now.

You build a city in Skid Cities, this should sound fairly simple considering the name of the game. You start off with a big plot of empty land and must build your hustling metropolis from scratch and you achieve this by laying out zones in a similar way to Cities Skylines. Personally, I believe that if the system isn’t broken why fix it and the zoning system isn’t perfect but it does allow you to build a big city in a short space of time.

The way that Skid Cities aims to really stand out from the rest is the way that you can build huge cities and can even make a huge amount of your city underground. Yes, you can build underground cities! When building your city you can essentially go up or down a level, similar to the way the Rollercoaster Tycoon games let you build coasters underground. You will have to link all of your utilities to the underground city too, so keep this in mind when building a complicated city.

There are a huge number of maps and starting locations, especially for an Early Access game. There are a few starting maps to choose from and then once you have chosen a starting map you have to choose a location within that map to start your new city. The interesting part about this is that they have added a multiplayer component around this where other players' cities will populate on your map in the other starting locations. I wasn’t able to completely explore this as the feature has only just been added to the game but it sounds like a great concept. The multiple maps and starting locations also provide a lot of options for replayability.

The game’s UI is a complete and utter mess. It is worth noting that this game is in Early Access and because of this the game is constantly changing and evolving. However, it's worth talking about as the build that I am writing this preview on is the build that you will play if you purchase this game. The UI just puts everything into a corner of your screen hoping that you will remember where everything is. Other city building games have great layouts for their UI, whereas, Skid Cities UI is just overwhelming even after you’ve spent hours playing the game.

Another thing that you will spend your time doing in Skid Cities is building roads; this isn’t great especially once you consider that the game really doesn’t like it when you build roads. Whilst this is partly due to the poor UI, I believe that the issue in building roads is due to the multiple layers feature that I have mentioned previously. While this is a really innovative feature, I found myself having great trouble when trying to build road networks that won’t cause issues with traffic and don’t look poor to the eye. It also just feels clunky when trying to choose where to place your roads down.

There also aren’t a huge amount of options when it comes to things like city policies. Whilst this isn’t a feature that I would expect to be in every type of game, it is disappointing post Cities Skylines that features like that aren’t making the cut in similar games. I feel this is a missed opportunity especially in a game that is cyberpunk inspired, it would be cool to create different districts each with its own set of rules.

It’s also worth noting that Skid Cities does look beautiful in terms of the art style and the different assets and models in the game, it is an incredibly pleasing game aesthetically speaking.

Whilst the art style and models are good looking, the game world unfortunately feels dead even once you have a big city. This is another disappointment as it is vital for games like this to get the world feeling alive and make it feel as if your city is growing by showing the citizens moving in, or by showing the city gradually getting bigger and bigger with more cars coming into your city.

Skid Cities is available now on Steam Early Access.