// PC GAMER — GAMING
After playing a bit of Lego Skylines, it seems like a city builder for people who care less about traffic jams and more about decorating
A short preview revealed a cozy and calm builder with some gorgeous views.
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It makes so much sense I can't believe it didn't happen years ago: as revealed at Gamescom last week, Lego is finally fulfilling its destiny by making a city builder. And I'm happy to say I got my eager hands on an early build of Lego Skylines for a little preview.
I do want to make this clear: the preview build I played was very short, with only about 35 minutes of playtime. It was almost entirely focused on building one small neighborhood, with the population maxing out at around 50 residents by the end of the preview. That's not quite long enough, or big enough, to get a real feel for a city builder.
But what's here is immediately appealing. The little Lego world I worked on was simply lovely. Click to build a house and it'll quickly be constructed in a colorful shower of Lego bricks falling from the sky and piling up into a cozy-looking little home. Bulldoze a mistake and the building will collapse into a heap of plastic bricks on the ground. The cute animations and cheery visuals are exactly what I'd hoped for when I saw the game's trailer last week, and again made me wonder why Lego didn't make a city builder years ago.
As in builders like Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive is publishing this one, too), you drag roads out across the ground and connect buildings to them: houses, shops, farms, and factories. One thing I noticed, in this build at least, is that the map is almost entirely a flat plane, with only a few areas I could see where the elevation changed a bit. I didn't see any terrain manipulation tools in the build, either, which is a little disappointing.
A lot of the focus is on customizing each of the buildings you place. You can boost a homeowner's happiness by decorating their yard with items like mailboxes, barbeques, flowers, wheelbarrows, fountains, and all sorts of little prebuilt odds and ends. But each household also has a specific taste, called Flavor.
Choosing decorations from the Flavor categories listed, like "cozy" or "nature," will increase the household's happiness. Flavor is optional—it's a city builder, after all, and not everyone wants to obsess over the micro-details—but if you want to make every single citizen in your city overjoyed with their home, you've got the tools to do it.
Completing quests for your residents is another big part of the early game. As you're planning and building, you might see an icon over someone's head indicating they have a request. Maybe they want you to build them a home in a more secluded area, or they'd like a park built in their neighborhood.
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