![]() It never made much sense to have identi-kit Plazas and Small Parks dotted around what should be a diverse and evolving collection of humanity. Parklife’s individual buildings might be a little simplistic, but the fact that players can properly shape a park or a zoo space definitely makes it easier to create cities with dynamic and interesting green spaces. They’re more interested in making the most beautiful or creative cities possible, or near-perfect facsimiles of existing areas. Much like Minecraft, there is an audience playing Cities that cares less about min-maxing and gamifying the mechanics on offer. Water, Electricity and Waste have all been moved under one tab, which makes a lot of sense as most builders are likely to need to update all three aspects of their city every time they make a significant expansion. Fire and Police have been rolled into one area, as have Health and Education. In a wise and perhaps necessary move, some of the older categories have been merged into single tabs on the main menu. One saving grace is the slight redesign of the main toolbar with the addition of yet another category of management. Some of this might get patched out, but it’s a shame to still be fighting to get basic controls to work on the console, presumably suffering under the sheer bulk of competing systems and functions added by two years of DLC. It is nice to see your citizens blow off a little steam, at least.Īs always with Cities, this issue is compounded by some sluggishness and glitchiness on the home console version of the game. However this is a small feature that doesn’t quite justify the rest of the package. It’s nice to have Bus and Walking Tours available as traffic routes, making the funnelling of your tourism industry more dynamic – as always, Cities excels when it comes to traffic flow. This is really an update that is just about making things prettier, and the individual park attraction objects aren’t particularly pretty anyway. There might be spikes in traffic at the entrance, and it might change the overall tourist attractiveness, but really these are things that could also be achieved by just dumping tonnes of the game’s original recreational spaces across the map. Unlike Natural Disasters and Green Cities, a player’s actions in using the Parks systems have minimal impact on the rest of the cities’ well-being in the long term. You can switch on some park-specific policies if you like, but the relative value of doing so is minimal compared to the hundreds of other switches, dials and services available in the larger game. In other words, despite the complexity of the park one might have designed, its success boils down to the same basic metrics that measure the success of any standard block of real estate. To level up your park, you simply need to have a relative “value” for the park space that meets a requirement, and a total footfall that meets a requirement. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Parks’ levelling systems. ![]() The basic park levels aren't particularly pretty or interesting. But then the question remains – why not play those games to get your fix of running a park, rather than these simplistic versions? Of course it would be far too much to ask the Amusement Park to offer the same level of building variety as RollerCoaster Tycoon, or the Zoo type to offer the mechanics of Zoo Tycoon. You may be able to zone out your Park area, but the building options within each Park type are sorely limited. ![]() The problem is that even with Cities’ impressive level of granularity and the extra microscopic dimension that Parklife gives to recreational spaces, it can only go so far – and Parklife reveals its limitations far too early in the process. Players can set the price on the gates, lay out all the concessions, amenities and attractions, and get creative with the shape and size of the park – likely attractive to those dedicated players that want to accurately depict real-world parks like Hyde and Central. Rather than set down a pre-fabricated park of minimal size, Parklife allows players to zone out an area as a park space and then build a park road by road, attraction by attraction, tree by tree. Where Natural Disasters and Green Cities felt like they brought a sense of reality and vulnerability to our precious cities, Parklife is mostly a mixed bag of aesthetic assets that allow players to design recreational spaces in a more granular fashion.
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