[flight-ready jazz tunes] [computer buzzes, beeps]
Oh man, remember Cities Skylines? Yeah it's been goin' since 2015, and I honestly thought
that Colossal Order and Paradox were done with it. At least in terms of releasing
new expansion packs, but I guess not! I mean the previous pack, Sunset Harbor,
was almost two full years ago in March of 2020. And kind of out of nowhere, here is another one:
Cities Skylines Airports, the 10th expansion pack which launched on January 5th, 2022 for $12.99,
a few dollars less than the usual. And as you'd expect, this time around it's all about building
modular airports in designated airport zones in your city limits. And yet again it's building
on the system that's been used many times before in other expansions, like Park Life, Industries,
and Campus. You know, you set aside an area to build within, you place a few required buildings.
Dispassionately dole out decorations and add-on building modules to increase the attractiveness
rating of that zone. And then just wait for enough citizens to drop by, either cims that live in the
city or tourists coming in from outside. And once enough of them do then you'll get to the
next level and you unlock more stuff, and then you repeat that for a few times, and that's that.
It's just with airports this time, so let's get into some details. Starting real quick
with the new maps, which it does provide a nice few selection of flat-ish kind of areas
in order to build airports. Or you know, whatever else but it's good for airports. And of course you
can build the new airports anywhere you like, and I just prefer to build them in my existing cities
because I've had them going for years. And as for the airports themselves,
a good chunk of the buildings and the new stuff comes in three different styles: classic, modern,
and ultra modern. It's basically just affecting the terminals, concourses, and control towers,
which you can mix and match or stick to one theme if you want to give your airport a theme.
Now these airports, it's also worth noting are also places for taxis, buses, metro, and trains
to connect and integrate into the airport itself. Which is quite similar to some of the existing
airports in the game or in different expansions, like the Metropolitan Airport, something that I
quite enjoy using since it integrates so much into one. So what do you actually get with these new
airports? Well the main advantage is that you get that same kind of functionality but you're
given the freedom to place each one of those connections exactly where you like, and you're
not held to a pre-made object. And that's about it really. Everything else that these airports do
is basically the same as existing airports, with a few extra steps to make it function.
Of course whether or not that's worth grabbing an expansion to pull off, I mean you know,
that's your prerogative. As for me, I'm very much mixed on this pack overall, you know, I love the
idea of airports and aircraft and adding any of that is highly intriguing. But yeah, like I said,
back and forth. So let's start with the stuff that I thought was good. Like the new buildings, they
pretty much all look excellent. Especially all those unique terminals and modular buildings. And
it gives a few different variations that are very much welcome. And I also like how when
you're getting ready to set up a new airport in the first place, the painting of that zone
discards the trees and flattens the entire area automatically. Something you'd need to do anyway
so this just saves on a bit of the prep work. And also combined with that is the new feature,
it's very handy, where you can buy and sell soil now. So you don't have to build mountains, or dump
stuff somewhere else, or pull dirt from another place on the map. It was just a whole routine
doing landscaping and terrain editing before this, and now it's much easier. Another nice addition is
the cargo air traffic, which you've already had in the game in other forms. Yeah it doesn't need to
be a completely separate airport now, if you don't want it to be, so you can just integrate it right
alongside your civilian and other aircraft in the same airport zone. Which can be both a good and a
bad thing, depending on what kind of traffic situation you got going on. Because you know,
you might be sharing runways and roads in and out, but yeah. You can also drop in things like
rail cargo and other types of roads specifically for industrial vehicles. In fact you can also
just straight-up place cargo aircraft stands along any road, no terminal required. They'll
just need taxiway and runway access, you can just make this happen pretty much wherever.
Another fun but minor new addition is the aviation museum, a new unique building/tourist attraction.
I mean it's just one of those, you plop it down, unique building. People come to it or they don't.
It would have been nice if it did something else, like I don't know, enable the historic air shows.
Or air shows of any kind would have been a cool addition, but nope. It's just a building.
Really I could make the argument that the best part of this pack is starting your city airline,
accomplished by unlocking the Airline Headquarters building. And then you can just start your own
little business and customize it to your heart's content, within the limits of what you can do.
I don't know, I had a little bit of fun with it for a few minutes. You can customize your
ticket prices and the color of your planes and choose from six pre-existing logos.
It's kind of underwhelming in the end, I could go for an awful lot more of things to mess with, but
you know. I guess that's what ‘airport tycoon’ games are for. And it's just kind of neat to see
your own specific aircraft coming and going in the airport. And yeah, it's just a little touch of a
feature that I approve of. And I'm sorry to say that that's about it in terms of the good of the
pack. I found a bunch of little things that were completely missing, or it could have been done
better, and just confusing choices. Okay so first up: the modular airports, in my view, arguably
look worse than pretty much all but the most basic pre-made airports that are already in the game.
At least without doing a lot of pre-planning and making sure that you have everything ready for the
later levels. There's definitely some enjoyment to be gleaned from learning, designing, and tweaking
your airports to get them just right, at least if you're into that kind of thing. But I found that
process hard to get into here, especially because the tools aren't really fleshed out enough.
And yeah I know that your first airport or two is gonna look like crap, and you can improve
things with careful planning, but there's only so much you can do in terms of the way it looks
and operates. For one thing there's no contiguous apron on the airport, or tarmac at all. You know,
the area in-between where the planes do their boarding and parking and fueling, and onto the
taxiway and runway. There's just a lot of paved tarmac area on an airport and that's not really
here. Even if you cram everything up together, it will start to connect some things, but at
the end it's still going to be loosely connected plane stands, taxiways, and runways. On that note
the taxiways themselves are just annoying to work with and rather unruly, functioning as glorified
one-way roads. And another thing to note is that the taxiways, the planes reverse the entire length
of them. Something I didn't realize at first and it looks extremely silly. Something to keep in
mind when you're designing them, make them a lot shorter if you can. Another design element
that I found confusing regarding these kind of things is the fact that you can't overlap any of
the runways to create perpendicular runways, or cross runways, whatever you want to call them.
Something that pre-made airports already have in the game and you see all the time in real life
airports. Now you might think it's, oh, they don't want planes to collide or something. But
clearly the simulation doesn't care about that. None of the vehicles in Cities Skylines can
collide and cause any problems, they just go right on top of each other. So why can't you cross the
runways? I don't know. And kind of building on the whole customizing and beautifying your airport,
just making it look like a real believable airport. The fact that you still cannot place
down any filler surfaces, it just bothers me more and more. It's something I've wanted since launch,
just the ability to click an empty grassy area and fill it with concrete, or tarmac or something,
an appropriate material. But nope, still can't do that, and I really think you need it now more than
ever. As a result most of the remainder of the items that you can place in your airport zones,
like all these decorative planes and hangers and fuel depots and things that do absolutely nothing,
they're just static objects that are decorative. Yeah, they're all squared off and disconnected
from everything else, except when they're placed right up against taxiways or other objects that
kind of have a bit of a tarmac/concrete thing going on around them. I don't like the way any
of this comes together. And the last things on my list here are just items that are either missing
or I wish worked a little bit differently. Like there's no helipad add-ons for your airport zones,
you just gotta use that other pack that they came in and have those as a separate building.
There are also no car parks or parking of any kind in your airport, which is really odd.
There is a rental car lot that you can add via one of the three policies in the pack,
but they remain completely unseen and there's no lot anywhere. It's just cims come and go in cars
instead of buses or whatever. There are also no single engine planes or general aviation
of any kind that you can add to this airport zone, that's from this pack. I mean you have
the aviation club that existed previously in the game, or as a part of another pack. But
again you just can't put it inside the airport -- or I mean, you can put it inside there, but it
doesn't integrate. It's just completely separate runway, so, what in the world. And for that matter
why aren't there any water runways or seaplanes or any of the stuff for your daggum harbors? I mean
it would have been nice to pair with the Sunset Harbor pack from two years ago, but oh well.
And yep that right there is it for the Cities Skylines Airports pack. Something that is not
worth the price, in my opinion. As if you had to ask. I mean, this is truly unnecessary. Of all the
optional DLCs that Cities Skylines has gotten so far, this is the most optional to date. It's a fun
little distraction for an hour or so, but by that point I'd already unlocked everything a few times
over in different cities, and placed all the stuff I wanted to. And then just kind of forgot that the
airport was even there because there's really no challenge. It's pretty self-sufficient as long as
you've got enough decorations attracting people to it, and that's that. I mean, at least it’s
two dollars less than prior expansions that were fifteen bucks, but eh. No, just no. I trust that
the last two years have mostly been spent over at Colossal Order developing a sequel, because
this right here is just really underwhelming. And if Airports does end up being the final expansion
pack for Cities Skylines, then. Welp. I guess it's going out with a whimper. Or a stall...
...airplanes.
[jazz intensifies]
And if you dug this review of the Cities Skylines pack then well,
I've covered a bunch more, and I don't know if there will be any more to cover.
So maybe stick around for the other LGR things that I've got coming up,
there's always new stuff in the works. And as always, thank you very much for watching!