Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters

This is one of the best treatments of disasters in a city simulation, blending the actual demands of emergency planning measures with apocalyptic moments that ratchet up the tension in the virtual mayor’s office.

This has an intensity that vanilla Skylines does not have, this race against time element, this coping with cataclysm factor. You don’t have to play Scenarios – you can just have disasters as a randomly-occuring risk in a standard game. But the Scenarios do provide a backbone to something that sometimes seems a bit stuck on the fence between ‘game’ and design tool.

Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters is a good, albeit slightly expensive addition to the core game. One of the huge features being given free as part of a patch detracting from the DLC seems unfair to say, but it's true nonetheless. However, the disasters add a whole new element to the game and the addition of helicopters make for a very interesting and useful expansion to your emergency services.

Worth the price of admission the Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters DLC offers extra depth to a game that was already quite engulfing. It enhances the experience by upping the excitement factor and by offering players the ability to play God. This is easily recommended to those who already own the original base on Xbox One.

This is one of my favourite content packs for Cities: Skylines just because of the new challenge it offers. It’s also really cool to completely blow your city to bits.

The biggest down side - if you can call it that - to Natural Disasters is just how obvious it all is. Helicopters and shelters, weather stations for early warning, loss of life, rebuilding efforts, and so on. The whole idea of demolishing huge areas of your city with various crises. It's all been done before, and while it most certainly belongs in a game like Cities Skylines, I wasn't really surprised with the novelty of any of it. Does that mean it isn't fun? Heck no! Of course it is. Either playing with random disasters as part of the challenge, or manually bringing about the End of Days on your city like a vengeful god are brilliant ways to spend your time. Because, deep down, I suppose there's something in all of us that loves to just watch the world burn.

It introduces challenges that to play without this DLC would feel naked otherwise. There may not be UFOs, but there is plenty to keep you on edge during your time getting back into Cities: Skylines.

This expansion adds a little more challenge to the game in addition to a bunch of really cool visual effects, but this expansion might not be for you if you don't like to see your cities being completely destroyed by random acts of God.

Wwith a disaster scenario in hand, or perhaps one created with their easy-to-use scenario editor, you'll get more than enough enjoyment out of Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters to both consider it a true expansion and make it worth its asking price.

There are five scenarios built into the expansion, just to give you a little idea of what’s possible. They’re actually rather tricky, with a mixture of disasters being flung at you, time limits and tough targets to meet.