Cities: Skylines – Coming Soon To Xbox One

Cities: Skylines is coming in Q2 2017 to the Xbox One. The city building/management sim is being developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. It was first released on PC back in March 2015 and has since sold more than 3.5 million copies. Colossal Order, the team behind the game was given the go ahead to begin development after the spectacular commercial disaster that was SimCity back in 2013. Paradox Interactive felt at the time that SimCity's lose might be something that they could capitalise on, 3.5 million sales later, I think they were right.

As I said at the beginning, Cities: Skylines is a city building/management sim. At the start of the game you will be given a 2km by 2km plot of land and a bag full of cash. From here you can build roads, zone land for residential or industrial use, plan basic services such as power, water and of course sewage, you don't want your brand new city or beach town stinking of human waste now do you.

As Mayor of your own city you will be responsible for the folks that live there. Urban planning will be important, setting up efficient road networks for people to travel to and from work without causing or getting stuck in major traffic jams. You will need to build public services for your city folk too, bus and train services, hospitals,schools and fire stations will all have to be created and managed to keep your population happy. As Mayor you will also need to balance the books, taxes will need to be collected to keep the city ticking over, but tax people to high and you will likely just piss them off but having taxes too low will mean that your budget will be bust and you will lose the possibility of purchasing nearby lands to keep expanding your city. You will need to find a good balance.

The Xbox One version of Cities: Skylines will also come with the "After Dark" expansion pack, there are 3 packs available for the PC version but unfortunately we will only see one for now anyway. Unfortunately again, the Xbox One game will not have any mods either, this is understandable of course but it would of been nice to see some of them included, the PC game has some good ones, such as a first person mode and a flying mode. Maybe if the game becomes a commercial success, we might see them added later.

The control system is what is going to make or break Cities: Skylines on the Xbox One, mapping a mouse and keyboard setup to a controller is never an easy task but thankfully the very talented folks over at Tantalus Media in Australia are taking care of this matter. Their approach will be, not only to map the controls but also to change the UI from the PC version so that it suits the Xbox One controller and player. Time will tell if they can pull it off, if this game is going to be a success, more than anything else, the controls need to feel and act right.

We have no exact release date for Cities other than Q2 2017, so with a bit of luck it doesn't slip till later in the year. The Xbox One needs these types of games and I believe there is a huge market out there for them if they are done right. This has a huge following on PC and rightly so, by all accounts its a brilliant game that will suck hundreds of hours of your life away. Fingers crossed, hopefully its a cracker on the Xbox One also.

Please feel free to leave any thoughts you may have on Cities: Skylines in the comments below

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Image From citiesskylines.com