LEGO Skylines is the new plastic city builder from the developers of Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath, Iceflake Studios, published by Paradox Interactive. I played an early version for about an hour, just long enough to design a circular highway of cafes, glass-fronted houses, impossibly cheerful farms, and playgrounds sprouting randomly like mushrooms. A bit like the M25, but more rustic. There is a park in the middle that we don’t know what century it is in, with an ornamental fountain every ten steps to confuse the casual walker.
It’s a happy and confusing little Legoland, which I was sad to say goodbye to when early access ended, but I admit, LEGO Skylines as a whole leaves me distinctly… upset. As a city builder, this is rather mild and all too familiar: you have residences, businesses, and utilities that must be connected by roads, with prosperity translating into citizen happiness. But more importantly, I’d like to just build my LEGO city brick by brick. Instead, the game gives you prefabs that you can then customize at length with spas, flower beds, mailboxes, etc., which seems like a glorified half-measure. Why won’t they let me become a project manager? Don’t these people know that I once made a whole human hand from M:Tron parts, with working joints and fingertip magnets?
I imagine many LEGO enthusiasts will feel the same way. And would you believe the idea came to Iceflake earlier in development. But then Iceflake realized that putting together a LEGO building using a mouse and keyboard wasn’t as enjoyable as doing it with good old plastic blocks, especially when you have a city to manage.
“We talked about building brick by brick and things like that,” producer Joanna Ronkanen told our Julian during a demo at Gamescom this year, “but we realized that it takes a lot of work, even for simple players, to place brick by brick. She illustrated her point by waving a LEGO model of a park bench from the demo booth. “Even this little thing probably has 50 bricks. We wanted to make sure we were at the right level of customization. » Ronkanen believes that the game’s model-based approach is “a pretty nice compromise, in my opinion.” You can do a lot of things, you can customize a lot of things. »
Game director Lasse Liljedahl, meanwhile, assured that the game’s ideas about bricks become more elaborate later in the game. “We’ll show other things a little later and talk about other features that we’re not ready to talk about yet,” he said. “It’s a Paradox game and it’s a LEGO game, so customization is one of the key pillars of this game, what you can do yourself with the LEGO bricks in the game is something that will come a little later.” Intriguing. There’s also the prospect of official support for mods that could enable deeper building, with Ronkanen adding that “we’re not really talking about modding solutions at this point yet.”
I think part of the reason I’d like to see brick-by-brick construction in LEGO Skylines is the havoc it could wreak on the game’s otherwise simple city-building systems, like generating electricity or distinguishing between a residence and a workplace. You can put together a lot of things using LEGO. Many terrible and wonderful things.
I think it would be extremely fun to see the game’s economic systems attempt to rationalize, say, a Tower of Babel made up of a thousand load-bearing spas, or a contorted, gap-toothed ruin of the kind you get when you really. to want to build a city, but there just aren’t enough corner pieces and six-by-eights in the damn box. Or a city made of repurposed, flexible, and magnetically alarming spaceship components. Yeah, let’s see you real estate agents figure out the service fees for a town like that.
