Once you've started a new game, you'll be taken to a choice of available maps. Putting all this front-and-center just gives the game a completely different feel from EA's offering, reinforcing a real love for the fan community. All of this content goes into your content manager - which comes pre-stocked with unlimited money and unlock all buildings mods - where you can turn on and off the content you want to use in each playthrough. Right there on the first screen, Paradox and Colossal Order play up the available mods! Cities: Skylines has full Steam Workshop integration, offering players new buildings, maps, save games, and other content to download. When you first boot up Cities: Skylines, you know something is going to be different in the game. Cities: Skylines expands the studio's work into a full city simulation. Colossal Order previously worked on the Cities in Motion games, which offered up simulated cities, but only let you directly affect public transportation within these cities.

This new heir apparent is Cities: Skylines, a new title from Colossal Order, published by Paradox Interactive. Where SimCity missed, someone has stepped up to provide the city simulation many of us have been looking for. It was not as successful as it could have been. Those were great days in my childhood and I hoped SimCity 2013 could recreate them in adulthood. I remember toiling on my city in SimCity and SimCity 2000, building it from the ground up before razing it all to the ground. When EA Maxis relaunched SimCity, I was hopeful that a fresh set of eyes could update the series for a new generation. Here's some early impressions until I'm done. So, I haven't had enough time to fully get in there and truly break the game. I left for PAX East on the night March 5.

I received the review code for Cities: Skylines on March 3.

Cities skylines vs simcity