While the change in your city's look is striking enough, the difference in its behaviours aren't nearly as well conveyed. Sunrises and sunsets act as intervals between your city's two acts, briefly washing its roads and buildings in a glorious reddish glow. Up close, your residential district slumbers to the chirping of crickets, while your commercial districts come alive. Hover the camera above your city at twilight, for example, and the details slowly fade away, while the moody glow of street lamps trace an abstract outline of the nearby streets and highways. It makes you wonder how the city functions given the sleep deprivation its citizens must suffer, but I suppose it's better than the city flitting constantly between light and dark as if God was idly toying with the celestial light switch.Ī city at night is an entirely different beast to a city in the daytime, and at first glance After Dark appears to represent this well. The sun moves across the sky at a pace considerably slower than that dictated by the calendar which ticks away in the bottom-left corner of the screen.

The most noticeable of these additions is of course the new day/night cycle, although technically it's more of a week/night cycle. Hence the developers have been forced to fill in whatever gaps have been left by the community, resulting in an expansion that is intelligent and methodical in some areas, and somewhat throwaway in others. Skylines has enjoyed official modding support since release, and the community has taken to the task like a duck to water, adding everything from first-person cameras to traffic monitoring tools. In defence of the developers at Colossal Order, it didn't make the job of expanding Skylines easy for itself. In my own little slice of paradise, cholera is considered something of a souvenir. Instead, they seem quite happy to cast out their fishing lines into the passing faecal shoals, and here is a hint of the biggest problem with After Dark, the first expansion to Cities: Skylines - while it makes many additions to the base game, they ultimately have little overall effect on how it plays. You'd think these waters reeking of human filth would prove a tad off-putting to my city's visitors, and yet nobody utters a peep. Over the course of several months, hundreds of tons of untreated effluent was carried downstream, turning my previously crystalline blue waters a distinctly nutty brown. Back when my proud metropolis was but a squalling hamlet, I only had access to a tiny strip of estuary to pump water out of and sewage into. It's the definitive tourist trap, but there's just one problem with the place - the sea is full of shit. As if that wasn't enough, Amity Heights connects directly to a dedicated leisure district, crammed with bars and nightclubs, for those holidaymakers who want to continue their hedonism after the sun goes down.

Cities skylines review