Cities: Skylines
BANGER · Strategy · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $29.99.
- Length
- 27.6h
- Value
- $1.09/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
November 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $2.99. 86 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. Among the games closest to it, Transport Fever 2 ($39.99, scores 79) and Cities: Skylines II ($49.99, scores 4) both come in lower.
Critics scored it 85. Players sit 8 points higher at 93 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,363 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 67 percent of the 7,534 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 27.6 hours. Doing everything runs 181, 6.6 times as long.
Still 8.8K concurrent players, 11 years in.
The drop-off
74% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
8,842 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
When I originally bought this game it was great, but a while after my purchase, Paradox introduced a launcher (that gives them access to all your data) and because I don't agree to give them open access to my data, I can no longer play the game that I legally paid for. Big thumbs down for that. I won't be buying any more Paradox owned or published games.
I have almost 600 hours this game. I LOVE cities skylines. It's my most played game on steam for crying out loud. But making me AGREE to you collecting my "personal data" to even play the game now? It's absolutely insane, no way am I agreeing to letting you collect my data for a single player game. Sad to say I won't be playing again, hopefully others follow in my footsteps after this insane update.
you need some mods to have a smoth experience i wold just download the first page of top rated mods all time on but with these mods good game
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Cities: Skylines scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/255710/cities-skylinesThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 10, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.