By the time my city had 1,000 residents, it was already the size of a good-sized city in another game, with an actually realistic-seeming sprawl of farmland surrounding it. You make your quaint little starting town, with its carefully planned road layout, neat farm cluster and tiny commercial district, and. Expanding in NewCity, by contrast, is like growing a massive lawn. You build the core of your city, then add to it slowly over time, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, stopping periodically to spend ages tinkering with road layouts.
Because while the basic elements of the game are all borrowed from elsewhere, the way they play out in practice is impressively original.Įxpanding in Skylines, which is pretty much the gold standard for this sort of thing right now, is a gradual business. And to be fair, this is probably one of the biggest obstacles NewCity will have to overcome, as in its early game it felt so much like a particularly barren SimCity clone, released decades too late, that I almost quit in disinterest.
It speaks the green-blue-yellow zoning language of SimCity fluently, and can manage a decent conversation in OpenTTD besides, to the extent where anyone familiar with the general territory can play pretty much by instinct. I don't feel like I need to explain the basics of NewCity because they are, ironically, nothing new. A baby city, newly hatched from its concrete eg. The game's core, on the other hand, feels like the foundation of something really special. NewCity's problems, therefore, don't concern me, as they're all fairly peripheral set dressing issues. But this is early access, friends! And early early access, too, as the game's only been up on Steam a couple of weeks. Its UI is bleak, and its music is - with profound apologies to the composer, who I'm sure has done much better work in other genres - horrendous. It stutters a bit, at least on my PC, when speeding up time in a decent-sized city, and it feels very feature-sparse, to an extent where in the early game I wondered if I was missing some menus. Because for all its wonders, NewCity is, as it stands, a fairly ugly game. Looking out of an aeroplane window with a migraine, that is. Indeed, in the later stages of the session I played with it, I kept zooming out and having the uncanny sensation I was looking out of an aeroplane window. There's no doubt about it: NewCity is all about urban sprawl, and actually comes close to being able to replicate the terrifyingly massive size of actual, real world cities. They make Cities: Skylines metropolises look poky, and cities from 2013's SimCity look like quaint little villages. We all know how Paradox seems to roll with them these days.The first thing that tends to strike everyone about NewCity, is how massive its cities are. While there are some features from the Simcities that are missing in Skylines, such as disasters, I got a feeling they'll be added in eventually as DLCs. You can also follow any person or vehicle in Skylines and you'll see them doing their routine and going to their destination. You can highlight districts with a paint tool and set individual ordinances to the particular district, another great addition. Ability to make great, interchangeable functional roads and highways is another, something which the older Simcities lacked. Skylines is the best city builder since Simcity 4, plays like it as well (uses the zoning method) and adds a number of great features to the game. SC4 has an amazing night mode and buildings are light up at night. However, this also means you can rotate freely around the city and buildings while SC4 allows only 90 degree rotations.
Skylines is a full 3D game, and the buildings are restricted to polygonal counts and smaller texture sizes.
This means that buildings in SC4 can have all the detail without polygonal constraints or texture size worries. Simcity 4 is a 2D game which take 4 perspective renders from 3D models of buildings. I've made custom buildings for SC4 and now making custom buildings for Cities Skylines. I shouldn't be buying anything, but let's say I want to urbanize shit up, does SimCity 4 still hold up visually? Is Cities: Skylines so much sleeker that I should just wait for it here? Is Tropico 3 close enough? Hi! Simcity 4 still looks amazing. Realkman666: It's like modern vs old, DRM vs EA, shiny vs deep.