Even if it does sound like too many actions, most of the regularly used ones are displayed beside their function all the time so the player shouldn't struggle with them much, if at all. There are a lot of of actions, definitely, but it remains fairly simple with only a couple of actions at most on an input. Finally, the face buttons: A is the 'select' button whether that's on the map or in menus, B closes or cancels whatever the player is doing, X's only action is for bulldozing and Y opens up the city menu wheel which has various information panels about the player's city. Pressing back will toggle the HUD on and off and the start button does what it does with 99% of games in existence and pauses the game. The triggers will zoom in (RT) and out (LT) whereas the bumpers will tab left and right respectively where necessary. Moving the right stick on the other hand will rotate the camera and clicking this stick in open the game's adviser about whatever is highlighted at the time. Moving the left stick either moves the cursor or navigates menus - although the D-Pad also does the latter - while clicking the same stick will pause/unpause time. No need to worry however as, thanks to using pretty much every button on the controller, control scheme works about as well as one could hope for on console. One worry players may have had, especially considering the game's genre, is how the original keyboard and mouse controls might translate onto console.

The central gameplay loop is to do all of this while making sure the city remains financially stable, because if you don't have money then you can't build, and subsequently you can't grow. The player will have to make sure the city has resources like water and electricity, balance the various types of buildings in the city (residential, industrial and commercial), make sure citizens are healthy and safe with police, fire, and medical care, and pass policies that can affect the city in major ways (marijuana legislation is one example) amongst a litany of other things.

Instead the player will have to manage the city in a myriad of ways, and from this is where the game's depth comes.

However, this isn't as simple as just dropping down buildings. In Cities: Skylines, the objective remains simple: make the biggest city possible. For example, the Tropico series, one of the few city builders that has also made its way to consoles, has much more of a political leaning to it. While the name of the genre is fairly self-explanatory in that they all involve building cities in one form or another, what exactly the player has to do can vary. Since city builders are few and far between on console, it's worth mentioning from the off what they are.

Cities skylines review