Cities: Skylines

A genuinely excellent, still-respected simulation core

Cities: Skylines' underlying design has aged remarkably well, and reviewers across a decade of history consistently credit it as the definitive modern successor to SimCity. "Seeing how much it's grown since 2015 with all of the updates and expansions has been an incredible display of progressing a game from its [launch state into something genuinely comprehensive]," reads a 2020 review, one of many that credits the underlying simulation systems specifically even while raising serious concerns about how that content is sold. The traffic, zoning and infrastructure systems reviewers describe are genuinely sophisticated, letting small, local planning decisions cascade into citywide consequences in ways that consistently draw praise even from the game's harshest critics on other grounds — nearly every negative review in this sample opens by stating, in some form, that the core game itself is excellent.

An extraordinarily consistent complaint about DLC scale and cost

What dominates this review base overwhelmingly is a specific, sustained complaint about how much of that excellent design sits behind a large number of separate purchases. "Please bundle the whole game in a $50 package; it's been 10 years and a sequel has been released during that time. Paradox's DLC practice is the only thing preventing me from recommending this game," reads a 2025 review. A 2023 review reports a specific figure: "Cities: Skylines isn't a city builder, it's a wallet drainer. The base game is just a demo for the €436.35 of DLCs they've carved out and sold separately." A 2020 review reports a comparable figure independently: "$226 for the rest of the game." This review cannot independently verify an exact current total cost across every DLC pack given how many exist, and reports these as figures multiple reviewers have calculated and cited consistently over several years rather than as this review's own audited total — but the consistency of reviewers converging on a similar scale, from different points in time, is itself a meaningful signal about the structure being complained about.

Several reviewers make a specific, more granular version of this complaint worth noting: rather than objecting to expansions existing at all, they object to fundamental features — ones a number of reviewers argue should ship in any modern city builder by default — being sold as premium add-ons. "The amount of DLC's and pricing for this game is beyond ridiculous. Basic things for a city builder are locked behind a paywall," reads a 2022 review. That's a somewhat different criticism from simply objecting to the total price tag: it's a claim about which specific features have been withheld from the base game, and it's worth distinguishing from reviewers who are comfortable paying for genuinely new content but object to the base game feeling deliberately incomplete without it.

A forced launcher that alarmed longtime owners

A separate, more acute controversy concerns a January 2020 change to how the game is distributed. "Paradox released an update that included their own launcher and updated EULA. Once you launch the game through the steam shortcut, it will install their launcher without consent, as malware behaves," reads a 2020 review posted the same day the change took effect. A separate 2020 review, from a player with over 200 hours invested, states plainly: "Today marks the day they forced an 'out of game' launcher on Cities: Skylines. Their reasoning? To sell us more stuff in the future by collecting our data." This review cannot independently verify the precise technical behaviour described, but the volume and immediacy of near-identical reports from the day of that specific update is consistent with a real, significant and unwelcome change to how the game installs and runs, rather than an isolated complaint.

More recent complaints about data and account requirements

A further, more recent wave of reviews describes an escalation of the same underlying concern. "A 10 year old single player game that requires an online connection in order to track and mine your data," reads a 2025 review, listing specific tracking domain names the reviewer says appear in the game's network traffic. A 2026 review reports a specific, serious consequence: "I'm bombarded with legal agreements and an account creation prompt. I go through the policies and go to the home menu and I'm locked out of my save!" This review cannot independently verify the technical specifics of what data is collected or transmitted, but reports this pattern as a consistent, recent and specific theme distinct from the older DLC-pricing complaints, worth flagging separately for any prospective buyer concerned about account requirements for an ostensibly single-player, offline-capable game.

A studio that's kept building, even amid the criticism

It's worth balancing the complaints above against what this review found checking Colossal Order and Paradox's own recent update history directly. The developer shipped a substantial new expansion and free content update, "Race Day, Iconic Brutalism, and Renewed History," in March 2026 — the game's first expansion in two years — alongside a temporary free-to-play weekend and, notably, an announcement of "Lower Subscription Prices," indicating Paradox has introduced a subscription option for accessing DLC content as an alternative to purchasing packs individually. That's a real, recent and directly verifiable response to at least part of the pricing criticism described above, even if it doesn't resolve every complaint in this review's sample, many of which predate that change.

Final verdict

Cities: Skylines remains a genuinely excellent, still actively developed city-building simulation more than a decade after release, and this review has no reservations about the quality of Colossal Order's underlying design work. What keeps the score moderate is the sheer scale and consistency of complaints about Paradox Interactive's monetisation and distribution choices — an extensive DLC catalogue multiple reviewers say costs hundreds of dollars to complete, a forced launcher installation that alarmed longtime owners in 2020, and more recent, specific complaints about data collection and account requirements. This is a genuinely worthwhile purchase for the base game and core simulation alone; budget carefully, lean on the extensive modding community, and consider the newer subscription option if broader content access matters to your specific plans for the game.