How does a city look after dark? Okay, I guess…
After Dark is the first official add-on to Colossal Order’s city sim, a game which leap-frogged the troubled Sim City. Cities: Skylines brought a solid and enjoyable experience to all those who delight in order, productivity and happy citizens. So what does After Dark add to it?
The main giveaway is in the name. ‘Day and night cycles’ are the headline feature – or rather night cycles that mix up the permanent daylight. Anyhow, the inverted commas are there because the cycle isn’t exactly daily. In Cities: Skylines, days go by in a blink, so rather than change the mechanic, we’ve been given around a month of night and then of day.
Ignoring this quirk of the in-game star system (and your citizens daily lives), the change from day to night brings with it an attractive aesthetic. Street lamps, commercial buildings, bridges and wind farms illuminate as residents go to sleep. Residential areas quieten as life moves elsewhere.
Other things change at night too – the rate of crime for one, although if you have a pretty safe city then you likely won't notice this a bit. Certain ‘leisure’ facilities see an upturn in trade (the new nightclubs and bowling alleys, for example), although disappointingly this doesn’t seem to strain your city’s police force either. Fights, property theft/destruction and some social unrest are definitely not to be encouraged, of course. Yet it’s certainly something I’d expect to see more of after dark. But no, once your city is safe, it’s pretty much safe. Colossal Order has missed a trick here, and that’s a shame.
Safe too with the night cycle is your mains power grid – that is, unless you load a saved game that incorporates nothing but solar power. That’ll need adjusting, or you can watch your city plunge into darkness during the month of dark every cycle of the moon. Oops!
Further additions include a commercial zone ‘tourism’ specialisation, in which hotels and other attractions will spring up into the sky, towering above residential streets and the local drug store. And should your citizens or tourists need help getting to such places, a new taxi transport option can be called on to add more strife to your road-planning rudimentals.
What ‘opens the box’ a little here is the addition of an international airport as well as waterside leisure activities, like a good old fishing tour or marina. However, as with the other additions in After Dark, these fail to add an extra engaging dynamic to change the way you go about things. This is the real shame. Yes, the game mechanic does lead you towards the happy balance that is successfully nurturing a growing city, but the lack of drama or change offers little extra to get excited about.
Having said that, Cities: Skylines has a healthy community, plenty of mods and charm enough to lure you back for one final tweak of your bus routes. And in adding to that, I suppose After Dark succeeds, if not in any fantastic fashion. Kevin Pocock
A solid update, if lacking excitement.