In the case of the tornado scenario, the initial horror gives way to a practical problem. How do you survive? How do you keep going? Floodplains, earthquakes, even a meteor that hits near a dam, the impact totally overwhelming it and submerging most of your nearby city. The best way I've found to experience the disasters in is a handful of new scenarios, set on custom maps tuned to regularly throw you into chaos. Bless you, Cities: Skylines, you aren't entirely set up for tragedy, are you?Ī spectacular, harrowing disaster, but also a brand new type of challenge for a game that, broadly, does not otherwise ask much of its players other than patience. The city - or at least the game that powered it - did not share my loss of faith. Even so, I stared at the screen, that vast grey, weeping scar that used to be people's homes and workplaces, in disbelief, any conviction that I could rebuild from it completely lost. This was my challenge: to cope with living in twister country, to rebuild from disaster, time and again, until such time as I was able to afford protection against it. Something more than simple demolition: these were carcasses, wet and grisly. In the twister's wake, the streets were empty, and what once were buildings replaced by watery grey lumps. Were they lampposts or pylons, perhaps? No. And small, silhouetted, stick-like shapes. Cars, even poor suckers on motorbikes, were hurled towards the horizon.
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It tore right through the middle of town, of course it did. I thought perhaps it would simply blow down the Eastern edge of town, causing a minimum of destruction. The windfarms fell first, a fizzing sound followed by the ping of pylon wires snapping. There were so many directions it could have whirled towards, but no, it only wanted to come this way. It approached the perimeter of my small city inexorably. A few small fires, occasionally a plumbing boo-boo that killed a few thousand from disease - but even then, death was just a number.
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I'd expected a handful of cartoon dust-devils, not this swirling titan. I'd known it was coming: I'd picked a scenario that specifically concerned surviving tornados, and early warning systems had informed me that death was on the horizon a short while before that awful pillar of destruction appeared. I whimpered when the first twister appeared. Its new natural disasters are absolutely terrifying. It's taken Cities: Skylines 19 months to do the entirely obvious thing, and I'm glad to say it's done it in style. Using earthquakes and hurricanes to play skyscraper dominoes has long been the alpha and the omega feature of citybuilder games (if you didn't trash the suburbs with an alien invasion, you weren't playing Sim City 2000 right).