Cities Skylines received a new DLC release towards the end of October entitled Industries. Having previously done a review looking at both the base game and each separate DLC before, I thought I would continue the trend by doing a more in-depth review of the new update, what it does, and how good or bad it is.
Cities Skylines Industries is a DLC that is taking a completely different direction compared to the previous few updates, Green City’s and Park Life. In the previous add-ons, the focus was all about cleaning up your city to make it a healthier place for your Sims to live and making it pretty while offering entertainment with parks and zoos. This time, the name doesn’t make it quite as obvious to what will be available to do. At first glance, the name Industries suggests that there’s going to be a focus on factory’s and griming up your city, but in reality, the main focus is on supply lines.
You start by fetching raw materials from the ground. This can be either wood through forestry, food through farming, oil through drilling and metal through mining. Each is produced by zoning an industrial area and then placing the main building for the type of area you want to use. For example, the farming department, placing a Farm House makes the area a Farming Industry Zone, from there, tree plantations can be placed which will make wood. Once the industry zone has leveled up, you unlock the sawmill, this mill turns the wood into Planned Timber. You can also place a Pulp Mill, this mill creates paper. The timber and paper can then be stored in a warehouse or sent to a specially placed factory that can then be used to make furniture to make a profit.
Each Industry has its own base level products that can be made. For example, farming, after placing a crop field, you can then make flour at the flour mill, but the crops can also be sent to an animal pasture which can be used to create animal products within the cattle shed. After collecting it all together, it can be sent to the Bakery where Pastries are made and sold on for a profit. It’s the same case for the other industries, if you go down the Ore route pulling metal from the ground, you can eventually place an Industrial Steel Plant. Or if you go down the Oil route, there’s a Household Plastic Factory that can be placed.
This is just the tip of the ice burg though. As you increase the levels of your industrial zones, more factories become unlocked. Combining resources from industrial zones allows you to create different things, if you use paper, timber, and plastic, you can create a toy factory. Plastic, Glass, and metal together create electronics. Towards the end game though, if you start combining things like timber, plastic, glass, and metal together, you can create Cruise Ships in the shipyard, or create the parts that would be needed to make modular houses.
The biggest challenge that comes with this DLC isn’t getting the products that you need to make each type of product though. The challenge is to be able to move the components from place to place to enable you to create the products. And then selling it as well. It’s the logistics behind it all. The placement of each final factory to highway access, train yard, and the brand new cargo air terminal is curtailed to be able to make a good profit, if it takes too long to get all the components together to be able to make a loaf of bread, then the factory will be sitting there doing nothing wasting valuable money. A good way to learn how the process works best is to use another new thing that they have added to the game. There is now a postal network. Sims can now post letters and packages and have them delivered around the city and into the external region.
This DLC is just one of the things that show how great and complex this game is becoming. The primary aim of Cities Skylines is to allow you to build a city how you want it to be. It does it very well compared to an offering that used to be popular that we shall not mention here. The previous DLCs where mainly all about improving the base game to make your life easier; with the introduction of this logistics system, the game is becoming border in what you can do. The game isn’t designed to be all about managing supply lines like in a game similar to Factorio or Infinifactory. But the bare bones base of the DLC does it so well when mixed with the already great base of Cities Skylines.
This DLC is easily worth an 8/10. With a little more instructions on how to use the DLC, it could easily be a 9.