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Policies are on the fanciful side, and establishing wildly different rules on social activities and even tax rates between neighborhoods in the same city will not go over well on election day. Smart use of districts and policies allows for the creation of cities that closely resemble their real-life counterparts.

If you want to go in the other direction with the sort of hardcore factories that killed grandpa, you can set up oil or ore districts and watch the smokestacks pump out poison. So if you want a green city, allow only farming use in industrial zones. You can also set up specific industrial areas to focus efforts there.

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This allows you to offer free public transit, boost education, give away smoke detectors, get into high-tech homes, ban high rises, and even alter tax rates for different zones. If you want your very own Brooklyn hipsters or a hardhat neighborhood for factory Joes, you can paint out city blocks and then tweak localized settings. This allows for the creation of boroughs with separate identities (policies can be set to take in entire cities, as well) by drawing them out with the Paint District tool. Two other great features involve establishing districts and policies. You always have room to correct mistakes and grow out of early problems, making you feel more like the super-mayor that you should feel like, and not the goofball constantly demolishing whole neighborhoods to fix problems you couldn't have foreseen three hours ago. That allows for expansive burgs, and an incredible sense of freedom. The initial size is restrictive at 2km by 2km, but you can access more plots of land to eventually expand to a metropolis spanning a whopping 36 square km. Second up is map size, which allows for a lot of stretching out. These basic mechanics provide thorough control over laying out cities, which gives you a real sense of being in charge.

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You have full control over zoning neighborhoods as low or high (medium is absent, although I didn't miss it) residential, commercial, and industrial. If you have been jonesing to be a virtual mayor, though, Cities: Skylines gets nearly everything else just right. The plainness is exacerbated by stark menu screens and dated visuals that are attractive enough to get by, while at the same time cutting corners by cloning buildings and signs, as well as lacking amenities like a day-night cycle and weather patterns. Nonetheless, at the present time, this 'just the facts' focus makes for an initially bland experience. Therefore, you can expect a lot of user-made add-ons to hit the net shortly. The game has been developed with modding in mind, however, and it ships with a full editor. You have one city to deal with, along with a mostly invisible outside world that allows you to buy and sell goods on a common market. There are no multiple-city games, either. Multiplayer is totally absent, as are frilly options like disasters and giant monster attacks. At least tips are provided on a continual basis during regular play. No tutorial is included, either, which makes for a learning curve at the beginning. You may also play the game with standard conditions, dial up the difficulty, and/or turn on sandbox and unlimited-money mods. Few surprises or even significant innovations can be found here: There is just a standard single-player mode of play in which you choose from a handful of maps representing territory types ranging from flat plains to tropical beaches. Colossal Order delves deep into what Maxis and EA once made so popular with a traditional city-building approach. Making comparisons between games is not always helpful, but in this case, it's difficult to ignore the tight relationship between Cities: Skylines and its SimCity inspiration. Is it too geeky to be excited about the use of zoning rules and policies in a city-building game? Proper zoning, room to grow, and the addition of policies and districts that let you plan out sensible city development make for a (mostly) bona fide experience in the virtual mayor's chair. Unlike the latest SimCity, which was far too fantastical to let me build cities that resembled those in the real world (size limitations and not being able to establish proper zoning districts drove me crazy), this Colossal Order production nails just enough of what is fun about running a municipality in the real world. Even though my real-world occupation as the mayor of a Canadian town means that I try to escape such things as budget meetings and zoning hearings when I play games, Cities: Skylines still managed to hook me due to its authenticity. See the end of the review for our thoughts. Editor's note: We have updated this review to reflect our experience with the Nintendo Switch version of Cities: Skylines.