Alongside the aforementioned beach-focused buildings, there's a riding stable, and even a zoo. Lastly, After Dark introduces a sprinkling of attractions to complement the tourist side of things. The largest cities unlock access to a sprawling international airport as well, and there are new pathway types for pedestrians and cyclists - although I found these rather tricky to fit around existing roads. If you're building a holiday seafront, it's a good idea to place a passenger harbour nearby, and threading your leisure districts with bus routes and metro stations will ensure a healthy supply of residents looking to gamble and drink themselves silly.Īfter Dark smartly broadens your options in this area, such as the taxi service which allows you to place cab stands throughout the city, or the large bus terminal that acts as a central hub for all bus services. Unlike the standard commercial zones, which require educated workers in order to thrive, the tourism and leisure districts live or die on the strength or your transportation links. Dedicating an area to leisure will result in fewer shops and more bars, nightclubs and casinos, whereas the hotels and apartment blocks of the tourism district have a dramatic effect on your skyline - impressive and obnoxious in equal parts.
That would be the new commercial districts, which allow players to specialise their commercial areas towards either leisure or tourism. The answer to this is that the darkness isn't actually the expansion's most substantial addition. A power outage at night will cause crime to skyrocket in that area. It's also important to note that After Dark's day and night cycle is actually freely available to all Skylines players, which raises a question about the expansion's real purpose beyond the cosmetic. Industrial areas clunk and hiss exactly as they do during the daytime, and the only major systemic difference is that crime increases at night, and the impact of this largely depends on your crime-rate to begin with. While the change in your city's look is striking enough, the difference in its behaviours aren't nearly as well conveyed.
Sunrises and sunsets act as intervals between your city's two acts, briefly washing its roads and buildings in a glorious reddish glow. Up close, your residential district slumbers to the chirping of crickets, while your commercial districts come alive. Hover the camera above your city at twilight, for example, and the details slowly fade away, while the moody glow of street lamps trace an abstract outline of the nearby streets and highways. It makes you wonder how the city functions given the sleep deprivation its citizens must suffer, but I suppose it's better than the city flitting constantly between light and dark as if God was idly toying with the celestial light switch.Ī city at night is an entirely different beast to a city in the daytime, and at first glance After Dark appears to represent this well. The sun moves across the sky at a pace considerably slower than that dictated by the calendar which ticks away in the bottom-left corner of the screen. The most noticeable of these additions is of course the new day/night cycle, although technically it's more of a week/night cycle. Hence the developers have been forced to fill in whatever gaps have been left by the community, resulting in an expansion that is intelligent and methodical in some areas, and somewhat throwaway in others. Skylines has enjoyed official modding support since release, and the community has taken to the task like a duck to water, adding everything from first-person cameras to traffic monitoring tools. In defence of the developers at Colossal Order, it didn't make the job of expanding Skylines easy for itself. In my own little slice of paradise, cholera is considered something of a souvenir. Instead, they seem quite happy to cast out their fishing lines into the passing faecal shoals, and here is a hint of the biggest problem with After Dark, the first expansion to Cities: Skylines - while it makes many additions to the base game, they ultimately have little overall effect on how it plays. You'd think these waters reeking of human filth would prove a tad off-putting to my city's visitors, and yet nobody utters a peep. Over the course of several months, hundreds of tons of untreated effluent was carried downstream, turning my previously crystalline blue waters a distinctly nutty brown.
Back when my proud metropolis was but a squalling hamlet, I only had access to a tiny strip of estuary to pump water out of and sewage into.
It's the definitive tourist trap, but there's just one problem with the place - the sea is full of shit. As if that wasn't enough, Amity Heights connects directly to a dedicated leisure district, crammed with bars and nightclubs, for those holidaymakers who want to continue their hedonism after the sun goes down.