Recent reviews by Slick Gamble

Do you like creation, or city building? If yes to either, give this game a long look. The two primary ways (soon to be three with the release of scenarios as part of the free update for the Disasters DLC) you'll probably play this game will be either sandboxing with infinite money, or more vanilla which won't use mods.

What I love:
Scale - The maps are massive. Even in vanilla in which you have access to 9 tiles out of a possible 81, you have a massive space to develop, decorate and grow. As a point of reference, Sim City 2013 maximum city space is equal to 1 square in Cities: Skylines. As a bonus, there are thousands of player created maps in the steam workshop, some of which provide fantastic settings to grow an empire or a small rural city.

Living Cities - The people and the traffic all have a life, a destination; they're not simply arbitrary numbers detailing their supposed existence. You will be tasked to provide the infrastructure they need to live and will be critical to succeed as mayor, civil engineer, and accountant of your city.

Cities: Traffic Wars - Some love it, some hate it. I love traffic wars. I love the problem solving, the beautification designing of interchanges; it's a very rewarding feeling when you solve traffic problems successfully. Nothing wrong with that. Yes, there is quirky behavior, but it doesn't detract massively from the experience. I have a couple tips: Leave space for traffic to filter and minimize weaving. That goes a long way. There are player guides that tackle how to solve typical traffic issues such as How to Traffic and even guides that look at traffic flow theory and how it applies to this game.

Workshop - Mod support and a massive amount of player content means there are enormous number of ways to build a city. Mods provide powerful options to take control, and build with massive freedom. Download responsibly and there will be minimal issues. You aren't limited to zoning and plopping, you can create beautiful, planned cities. The only limitation is your imagination.

Not so great:
DLC - A bit pricey for what you get, excluding After Dark. That dlc is excluded, and I would definitely take no issue paying full price on. Very feature rich. Unfortunately, the same level of praise is not really warranted for Snowfall. Trams and snow maps are nice, but I would not buy it full price.

Vanilla gameplay - As a first time experience to get achievements, it's fine in its own right, but in comparison to what you can do with the player content regarding the mods (you can use building assets, props, etc. in vanilla), the gameplay is limited and quality of life for the player tends to be lower with the lack of performance mods.

Difficulty - This is a double edged sword. Lack of difficulty is beneficial to those that simply want to build, grow and show off their skills with infrastructure building, and city painting. This is a negative for anyone that wants a challenging economy in vanilla. This will hold particularly true if you like that kind of gameplay in Simcity. Fortunately, for the challenge inclined, you can make it much harder on yourself with mods, and Scenarios are coming out soon, which will provide win and lose condition scenarios as part of the Disasters dlc. It will be free.

TLDR: Love building, traffic wars, the almost endless beautification options, and I can be a major creep as I roleplay God with my topdown world view as I stalk a handsome young man coming home from work as he goes home to sleep at night (he actually does live in that house). Glorious. Would I recommend to anyone that remotely likes city builders? Absolutely.