Colossal Order have FINALLY released a new major DLC for Cities Skylines. It has been too long. In reality, the city builder has been consistently added to by the developers, with the most recent pack having been the Natural Disasters DLC. For anyone who plays the game regularly however, that feels like a lifetime ago. Now, Mass Transit is here to save the day!
This new DLC goes back to Colossal Order’s city builder roots, in a way. The Cities in Motion games focussed heavily on getting citizens around bustling cityscapes, and whilst that has always been present in Cities Skylines too, this DLC makes it the focus. The content-rich package adds to the transportation options already available in the game, offering players some more obscure-yet-useful methods. Ferries, monorails, cable cars and even blimps are now options on the table, and whilst some of these might sound out of the ordinary, it is the unusual ones which I found most helpful…
As the sensible, down-to-earth city builder that I am, I naturally opted for blimps as my first new method for getting my citizens from A to B. Blimps can be set up to follow specific flight paths, with subway or bus-style routes then managing their station-to-station courses. Several citizens started using my blimps relatively quickly, as I had set them up as a convenient way to travel as the crow flies across long distances. This made journeys from one part of the city to another much faster than taking a car, and the clever AI seemed to recognise this. Not only were blimps efficient, but they also looked pretty cool flying around above the skyscrapers. They gave my city a welcome nibble of extra character as I watched proudly from above.
Next up was cable cars for me, which I used not for mountains, but instead for crossing large expanses of water. This looked simply awesome in action, and saved me building numerous long and ugly bridges across my cities lakes. The landscape was preserved, and once again the extra air of character which came alongside the added efficiency was very pleasing to the eye. Whilst this was not the transport option’s primary intended use, it served the purpose splendidly and with style.
The ferries and monorails I used less in my cities. There were a couple of reasons for this. Neither, I felt, had the effortless air of cool and stylish that the blimps and cable cars provided. The monorails, in particular, simply didn’t do it for me. The ferries on the other hand, although highly useful, just felt like a very normal way of doing things against the other methods that I had employed. Useful, for sure, but not really as entertaining or charming.
Setting aside my personal likes and dislikes when it comes to how swish my transport methods looked, there was another highly efficient addition in the Mass Transit DLC which is very worthy of mention. New transport hubs allow players to seamlessly connect different modes of transport. This might be connecting a bus route to a ferry stop, or the monorail to the metro. It is a simple but ingenious idea on the part of the developers, and not only did it add some extra realism to the game, but it was also highly useful. After I had used one once, I just had to have more. Soon my city was flowing like a dream with all these varied modes of transport about the place!
Naturally, just in case epic new transport options aren’t quite enough to make you spend your hard-earned pocket money, Colossal Order have also remembered to sweeten the deal. New scenarios offer transit-based challenges to players. I found these particularly tricky, despite my grasp of how to use the new modes of transport in sandbox play. They will certain please the more challenge-oriented members of Cities Skylines’ player base. New maps have been added for sandbox play too, offering prime opportunities to take the new Mass Transit features for a whirl. New landmarks and road types allow you to make your city look even more epic and efficient than ever before, and new policies related to Mass Transit allow you to make the most of everything you add to your cityscape. You can increase ticket prices for better revenue, for example, of place a focus on a particular type of transport in the city to encourage citizens to use it over others. Anything to keep the pennies and the people flowing! Chirper, of course, gets new hats too… hooray.
On the whole, I always find that Colossal Order’s Cities Skylines DLC packs are worth it. Mass Transit is no exception. In fact, it is perhaps the most useful DLC package to date. It has more utility than After Dark, more solutions than Snowfall, and more constructive options for the game than Natural Disasters, for sure. Everything in this package is worth having, and it has given my cities a breath of new life. If you are already a Cities Skylines fan then what are you waiting for? Mass Transit is a go!
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