While I know it’s not a perfect fit for Cities, I also pine for the more interactive, story-driven scenarios of the Tropico games.
They’re just a quick taster though, before leaving you to hunt through Steam Workshop creations, and I wish there were a few more of them. The Alpine Villages mission has you trying to get hundreds of thousands of people to use a burgeoning public transport network within 350 weeks – I was barely at 10% of the target when half my time had elapsed – while By The Dam has you on tenterhooks as you wait for a meteor to actually hit and destroy the dam, while you try and expand the city to higher ground in order to survive the worst. They’re actually rather tricky, with a mixture of disasters being flung at you, time limits and tough targets to meet. There are five scenarios built into the expansion, just to give you a little idea of what’s possible. Even the process of uploading to the Steam Workshop feels a bit awkward. The info panels are stripped down to environmental ones, so you can’t easily spot police stations, for example, to give a new player a crimewave to deal with, and it’s rather obtuse to have the city statistics hidden in the pause menu, as opposed to being within the editor’s interface – the stats are there to draw upon for setting figures, but there will be a lot of clicking back and forth. You’re just not given enough information to do this with. From there, you can bulldoze buildings and roads, perhaps do a little landscaping and set the scenario triggers and events. For one thing, you can’t build a city in the scenario editor, you have the play your way to that point and then load in a save file. The interface could be more intuitive, though. Triggers can even be stacked up, so you have to meet multiple conditions for something to happen. These can then be used to signal the player’s victory or loss, have a cheeky Chirp pop up from the little Chirper bird that hangs out at the top of the screen, or call in a natural disaster of your choosing. There’s a lot of options to fiddle with, and you can have all manner of triggers, from the number of people in your city and the cash in your coffers, to how many people have used the public transport options or the city’s crime rate.
The best bit? The scenario editor is a free update for all players. The natural disasters might be very showy, but I feel it’s really the scenario editor that adds a meaningful drive to the gameplay now. While there’s some amusement to be had smashing space rocks and tsunami waves into your city, there’s more to this DLC. Water is often the worst to deal with, as it flows across the map and takes and age to find its way back out to sea, disrupting city life for an age. The Disaster Response Unit will fly into action, checking the wreckage for survivors and making it safe for buildings to be rebuilt by the city’s people, while it’s up to you to restore the road network and work around any new features in the landscape.
Cleaning up the mess left behind is a mixture of automation and manual labour from yourself.