There has been a ton of buzz about Cities: Skylines, and I nearly bought it a couple times when I saw some good deals. However, as I stated in my previous blog entry, the purpose of these "What I'm Playing Instead" entries is to force me to buy less games and, instead, play games I already own that are in my backlog. I've spent hundreds of dollars over the last few years in Steam sales, on pre-order deals, and just accumulating games that I intended to play right away but never got to.
As you'll see from this post, the game I play instead is not always better than the newer game I'm resisting buying... :)
So, instead of buying Skylines, I decided to finally install and play SimCity...
All the pre-release footage I saw of SimCity looked incredible. I loved the art style, the way it seemed to replicate tilt-shift photography. I was also excited to jump into a city-building game for the first time in years (probably since the Caesar franchise which, believe it or not, I played more than the original SimCity or SimCity 2000).
In a way I'm very glad I played SimCity before buying Skylines, because I really think it showed me that I'm just not ready to play a city-builder right now...
I played about four hours of SimCity before uninstalling it. I just realized that I didn't have the patience to invest in the game, and I'd rather spend my time with one of the many RPG's I really, really want to dive into (Dragon Age: Inquisition is first to go back to, now that they've patched some better mouse/keyboard controls into it, then I have Pillars of Eternity that I backed, Wasteland 2 that I backed and am going to start over with the new patches, Shadowrun Returns that I also backed, and I still have to go return to and complete Bravely Default and Fallout: New Vegas...).
SimCity was a little maddening due to the lack of options, but it did provide enough options that I ran away with building my town (yeah, not big enough to be a "city," Maxis...) without waiting for money to come in and ended up with three massive grants to pay off and still had to shut down some services...
I really would consider going back to SimCity if I feel like I have the patience to. However, I think I'd rather go back to Banished, at this point. I played through the tutorials of Banished last Thanskgiving, as I wanted it to be one of my "Thanksgiving season" games, but I just didn't end up with enough time to invest in it.
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