168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cities: Skylines 2 looks like a very pretty game. In its latest glossy trailer, pushed out ahead of its October 24 release date, we see a resplendent city shimmering in the sunlight, beams of bright white dazzling on glass, calling city-dwellers with potential and promise. Cars flood the freshly formed streets, rubber paws prowling districts conjured by your own godly hand, metal scraping and writhing on top of itself, life bursting forth as high rises and condominiums and penthouses tower over the hustle and the bustle, the rush and the concrete and smog-filled air. You build cathedrals and chemical plants, foundations and factories, opportunities and offices. This is a world of your own making, the screaming mass of humanity arriving at your whim📖. What a violent video game indeed.
The aim of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cities: Skylines 2, much like its predecessor, is to build a city. "Every road, every home, every skys🏅craper, every district i𝔉s nothing without you," the trailer tells us, and despite the uplifting music, it almost feels like a threat. Each image we see in the trailer, every scar of road, tumour of building, feels inescapably like we are the bad guy, eradicating everything in our path for these silly and feeble pleasures.
Of course, the aim is not to be violent. You aren't intentionally building a death trap full of creative ways to maim and murder your unwitting inhabitants. It doesn't even have the violent-adjacent leanings of Humanity, the puzzle game where you direct followers around a map and can drop them off the edge of the world with no consequences. Cities: Skylines 2, most people would argue, is not violent at all.
In fact, Cities: Skylines 2 is marketed around its lack of violence. While a lot of games exist in a 'kill or be killed' headspace, Cities is positively peaceful. As light muzak plays, you plop down a city block like a kid with Lego, and line up all of the roads neatly. It's an organised, relaxing time, where everything just feels warm and snug. We have a serious problem with describing things as 'wholesome' or 'cosy' in gaming, and Cities: Skylines 2 is the ideal candidate to be called wholesome and cosy. The more realistic art style means it doesn't tick every wholesome box, but that sensation it's supposed to leave you with is the same.
If I played it, it might well leave me with the same sensation. I like organisation, it's a great game to 'switch your brain off' to, and there is both instant and delayed gratification in constructing a mammoth metropolis like this one. I imagine it would make me feel similarly fulfilled to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I poured 250 hours into at launch and have revisited for close to 50 more with the extra expansions. But the key difference is that, in Animal Crossing, you interact with the local flora and fauna - the most disruption you cause is through sustainable fishing or weeding your garden of🔯 the naturally occurring plant life.
However, in Cities: Skylines 2 we see you wreak havoc upon the local ecology, and that's just in the snippet of the trailer. You stomp down roads on bountiful grass, ripping up trees to stake suburbs into the dirt. You sicken the air with noise and smoke, steal the stars with your eternal electric lights, and eradicate the homes of millions of creatures to make room for a few thousand humans. With deforestation, pollution, the climate crisis, and overpopulation all major issues in our society, to see a video game put you in charge of the whole process and package it as a wholesome, feel-good time is odd to see.
I know this is the way the world works, and indeed the way the original Cities: Skylines worked. It's not necessarily a criticism of the game itself. Just an observation of the commodification of our own destruction, and how normalised our endless march towards planetary doom has become. There's nothing wrong with Cities: Skylines 2 and playing it doesn't make you a bad person, but if we think of games (or of all art) as being both passively and actively political, Cities has a lot to say, and loudly, even if it's all transferred passively. You can keep your city builders, and I'll go back to chopping heads of demons in Diablo 4. That's much less violent.