Cities: Skylines - Nintendo Switch Edition

Cities: Skylines is one of, if not the premier city building sim on the market. The amount of detail it is able to cram into every facet of the experience can feel intimidating at first, but getting to know all of the features at their disposal will be both crucial and satisfying in the player's pursuit of the greatest city on Earth. Some performance issues place a damper on the experience, as does the absence of content available in other versions of the game. Regardless, for Switch owners wanting to get their fix of constructing their very own megalopolis would be hard pressed to find a better resource than this.

The depth on offer in Cities Skylines is staggering, which is why being able to pick that up and take it with you is so exceptional. There is a limit to how successfully the console version is able to emulate the PC experience, but it does a good enough job that I can’t recommend the game enough to the Switch owner hankering for a city building game for their favorite hybrid console.

Even with a few PC issues and a less-than-perfect Switch port, Cities: Skylines remains the best city-builder on the market right now. The game's presentation is stodgy, but it is all but guaranteed to provide you many hours of carefully crafting cities, laying out zoning, and establishing districts for specifics residential and industrial uses…all free from real-world mayoral headaches like 6 a.m. phone calls griping about snowplowing. Right now, there is no better way to take a peek at life as a mayor without filing your papers to run for office in the real world.

I ended up getting sucked in surprisingly quickly, and I can see myself spending a lot more time trying to build up my city. It’s essentially a game you can keep playing forever, after all. If the framerate can be improved at all and gyro + touchscreen controls can be added, then this will make for a truly stellar port. Nevertheless, it’s still a surprise that Cities has been brought to Switch at all, and it’s managed to be competent enough to be worth a try.

If the Switch is the only console you own or if you fancy the idea of having one of the best city-building games on the market at your portable convenience, I would definitely recommend the buy. It is as good as anyone can expect a game this busy to be on Nintendo’s travel-friendly console, and I can genuinely say I anticipate its company on many more plane rides and commutes to come.

Cities: Skyline is sometimes frantic, sometimes peaceful, and great fun to play, but performance issues plague it at almost every turn.

Overall, this is a PC-quality, bonafide City Simulation game on a handheld console. Regardless of the system it is on, Cities Skylines is a one of the better games in the genre despite some flaws and missing features. If you can look past the performance issues during certain circumstances, this is a wonderful and remarkable game to be able to play on the go and at home that can keep you busy and entertained for the foreseeable future.

Cities: Skylines has been adapted to the Nintendo Switch in a competent way that allows for this city management experience to be thoroughly enjoyed in a format that at first might not seem the most suitable. Despite a certain loss of detail when it comes to the visual environment, the game provides for some fun and involving moments and will certainly appeal to fans of city simulations.

Despite the issues mentioned here, Cities Skylines on the Switch is still tremendous fun to play no matter if you’re playing it on the TV or in handheld mode. Here’s hoping some of the technical issues can be ironed out as time goes on, but if you can put up with a little jank and don’t have a PC to check it out on, Cities Skylines is still the best city sim out there and now you can play it anywhere.

The sense of satisfaction Cities: Skylines delivers, from gradually layering a city until it becomes a behemoth of urban design, finds a good home on Nintendo’s portable. The speed of activating the Switch works well for brief forays into neighbourhood management and policy adjustments. It’s only a pity that performance issues betray the difficulty of squeezing a complex PC game into a handheld console, and that the game itself can sometimes feel a tad humourless.

I’ve had a ton of fun playing Cities on a portable for nearly 15 hours but this is not worth buying in its current state unless you can stomach the visual and performance issues

While the underlying game is still fantastic, the Switch port of Cities: Skylines is plagued with poor performance and finicky controls. If this is the only version available to you then it may well be worth a look, otherwise you'd be better off elsewhere.

A predictably flawed Switch port which works fine in terms of gameplay but loses a lot of the spectacle and stress-free enjoyment to frustrating frame rate issues.

In terms of content and options you get everything (and more) that the other console versions had to offer. But it also pushes the hardware to the limit and beyond. Up the the point where there is no fun left when you look at the framerate drops that grow analogue to your city.

I can understand the appeal of wanting to put any title on Nintendo’s massively popular console, but I’m surprised publisher Paradox Interactive didn’t attempt to make an original version of Cities for the Switch. That would have been far more preferable than whatever we’ve ended up with.

Nintendo Switch finally has a proper simulation game to its name, but the reality of the console’s hardware limitations proves that not every game can be ported wholesale onto the platform without serious issues. Cities: Skylines - Nintendo Switch Edition has so much potential and offers a fine alternative to SimCity’s broken reboot, but this game needed to be revamped and re-approached for Switch in a way that doesn’t turn it into a performance quagmire. Sadly, this is a game better played elsewhere.