Cities: Skylines and Parklife DLC

Cities: Skylines is still the genre benchmark for PC city-builders, a simulation that asks you to juggle traffic grids, zoning, utilities, and public services across a sprawling metropolis viewed mostly from altitude. Parklife, released in May 2018 as the game's sixth major expansion, pivots the camera downward and hands you a completely new set of tools: freeform park districts that function like a miniature tycoon game grafted onto your city. The four park types - City Park, Zoo, Nature Reserve, and Amusement Park - each have distinct asset sets and their own flavour. You draw a district boundary anywhere empty land exists, drop an entrance gate connected to the road network, then manually place every path, building, bench, food kiosk, Ferris wheel, flamingo enclosure, or roller coaster inside it. Nothing auto-fills. That single design choice is the most consequential thing Parklife does. From a systems perspective, the level-up loop is clean and legible. Each piece of content placed inside a park contributes an entertainment value score, visitor counts climb, and parks progress through five levels, each unlocking new buildings and higher gate-fee tiers. The Park Maintenance service building slots in alongside your other city services and degrades park effectiveness if neglected, so there is genuine resource planning involved. Three new city-wide policies and eight park-specific policies let you micromanage details like fireworks displays at the main gate each night or animal ethics standards at your zoo, which feeds nicely into the kind of obsessive policy-layer management that long-time Skylines players already love. The accompanying Patch 1.10 overhauled noise mechanics so trees now actively dampen sound pollution, giving road-adjacent residential zones a new tool to work with entirely independent of the DLC content. The honest caveat is one that efficiency-focused players should hear plainly: Parklife's parks are not strong economic optimisers. Simply zoning a residential block near a Japanese Garden or basketball court does more measurable work on your tax base than a fully levelled zoo. Parks can generate income, but they will not become meaningful revenue pillars without careful placement along high foot-traffic corridors - and identifying those corridors requires reading the simulation at a population well above 14,000 before the numbers make sense. Min-maxers who treat every city as a score-optimisation problem will find the ROI underwhelming. Builders who care about the look and identity of their city will find it transformative. The six new unique buildings, including the Castle of Lord Chirpwick monument at the top tier, are a mixed bag aesthetically - several are large enough to dominate whatever sits around them. For newcomers arriving at Cities: Skylines with Parklife bundled in: do not treat the park system as something to engage before your city has a functional road hierarchy, reliable power, and water coverage. Build the infrastructure first, get a population above 10,000, then designate a park district. The onboarding for Parklife itself is not its strongest suit, and first-time park designers will produce something ugly before they produce something good. That is fine. The level-5 unlock moment, when you finally have the full asset library open and can see how a nature reserve or amusement park can define an entire district, is genuinely satisfying. The Steam user review score sits at 84% positive across hundreds of reviews, which is an honest reflection of a DLC that does one creative thing very well without pretending to be something it is not.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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