Cities: Skylines – Snowfall review

The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful! At least I hope the fire is delightful—the fire in this case being a burning furniture factory—because that’s the only way my poor citizens are going to stay warm since the power has gone out in the entire city. It’s not the snow causing the problem, mind you, it’s the cold. In Snowfall, the new expansion for Cities: Skylines, snow may slow down traffic on unplowed streets, but cold is the real killer. When the temperature drops, your chilly citizens crank up the heat in their high rises and townhouses, sucking the juice from your overworked power plants.

Back in September, the After Dark expansion added the tourism specialization and changes to day and nighttime traffic, yet I never felt much of an impact on how I played. Snowfall, on the other hand, almost immediately affects how I build, grow, and manage my city. For the first time since I deleted a hydroelectric dam and watched in horror as an entire residential zone was flooded in sixty feet of water, I was in a panic. Half the city was sucking up the juice to heat their homes, the other half were freezing, and my power plants were low on oil due to trucks being unable to reach them, thanks to my unsolved traffic problems. I enjoy Skylines immensely, but it’s never felt like much of a challenge. Now, when it comes to power management on winter maps, it does feel considerably trickier.

Boiling point

You have a few different ways to keep your city warm. There’s a new policy available that requires buildings to use more insulation, though construction and maintenance will cost a bit more and it won’t solve the problem when the temperature really plummets. You can stick with electric heat, though you’re going to need reliable routes to truck in coal and oil if that’s what they use (and I shudder to think about solar-only cities when night falls and the temperature bottoms out). There are also new new buildings: boiler plants (which require oil) and eco-friendly geothermal plants, both which use upgraded piping to deliver heat directly to your residents. 

If you want to use the new piping throughout your city, it becomes available when you reach ‘Boomtown’ status (2,400 residents) and you can manually overwrite any standard water pipes you’ve already got in place. Be prepared to pay through the nose for it, though: upgraded piping costs five times as much as regular water pipes and twice as much in upkeep. This slows down the early hours of building a city, but in a good way: I now find myself drawing water lines more conservatively in case I need to upgrade them later, I leave more room for future power plants, and I generally put more thought into the layout of my new cities.