Cities Skylines: Sunset Harbor offers you to try a hand in the traditional role of a mayor, whose task is to build a city and bring it to prosperity. There are several maps to choose from, plus you can draw your own map, as well as your own objects. The initially accessible area is small, but you can buy more and more land in the process constantly expanding the territory of your city.
It all starts traditionally – by laying the roads and filling the nearby area with residences, factories, shops and offices. There is no tedious “tutorial” here, but there is a system of hints that teaches you how to interact with various instruments right on the spot. As you explore your arsenal, you realize how complicated everything is. It’s not enough to just draw a road and divide the roadside area into zones. As residents begin to move in, it may well turn out they have nowhere to wash their hands and e-mail refuses to work without electricity.
Laying communications is a very important part of the gameplay. An unsuccessful engineering solution can easily ruin the entire population. For example, if you don’t notice there is a stream in the river from which the city takes water and put a water intake below the drain, the residents will quickly begin to get sick and die. No hospitals will help them if the main problem remains unsolved. Suppose you did everything right and considered the direction of the current. Why does the water in the dwellings still start to stink and the inhabitants get sick anyway then? The problem is that the river where you dump waste is gradually becoming polluted.
There are many such details in Cities Skylines. Take the noise level. Silence is broken not only by windmills that provide the city with energy, but also by shops and cars scurrying along the roads. So residents don’t really like living at crossroads, and the construction of a new highway near a residential quarter may well force them to take off and go in search of a better life. As a result, the population will decrease, as well as the income. Yes, being a mayor of Sunset Harbor isn’t easy, but it’s much more rewarding to find solutions and make your city thrive is there is a challenge. And this game hosts plenty of them!
