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Thanks to my contact at Paradox, I have been able to test the new Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters DLC [Steam, Official Site] before release. Here are my thoughts on it.

Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

Cities Skylines is a true gem. We don’t have many city builders on Linux, so when it arrived it was to the joy of many. It didn’t have too many features at release, but it did give them a foundation to continue to build upon. They have continued to flesh it out with free patches and multiple DLC since release.

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The new DLC adds in a bunch of disasters that can happen at random: you can be up against tornadoes, meteors and more. You can also make them happen manually, if you want to wreak havoc on your own cities to see how they would hold up.

Disasters is truly something the game had been missing, something other city builders generally have and so it makes the game feel more complete. I get that not everyone will want it, so even if you do happen to own it, the disasters are entirely optional, which is great.

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The disasters themselves are incredibly impressive! The meteor strike has to be my absolute favourite. The sheer destruction they can cause is sure to put even the best strategist into a panic.

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The way a meteor strike can create tidal waves after impact is crazy:

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This created a sticky situation, since my entire industrial complex had been destroyed and a tidal wave was heading towards my residential area. The panic you feel is very real too if they happen at random.

The tornado has to be my second favourite! There’s not much you can do to make a tornado look good, since it is just wind after all, but what they have done is beautiful. The high-speed swirling winds, mixed in with lightning as it eats up buildings and vehicles completely took me by surprise, they really have captured how powerful nature can be.

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You do have a chance to be prepared too, since this new DLC introduces a couple of new items to build. For the meteors you can build a massive satellite dish to give you an early warning, but either way there's not much you can do to help other than provide shelter for your citizens.

What is also great, is that DLC like this enables people to come back to the game who may have felt it got a little stale (like me). I hadn’t touched it in a long time and it reminded me of just how beautiful the game really is. There aren’t many city builders that can compete graphically with how gorgeous the game looks, even if it is on the simple side it’s still great.

Natural Disasters also comes with five different scenarios, each gives you an interestingly designed map with different possible disasters and targets to hit. So it adds a new element of strategy to a previously rather sandbox title. I hope to see more of this in future from both the developers and from the mod community.

The base game has also been updated for free, which gives everyone the Scenario Editor which enables everyone to make their own. A rather nice addition that and I can't wait to see what people come up with.

I haven’t been able to test the different radio stations that were added in for free, as they didn’t appear in the Linux review build and they don't seem to be in the now released build either. Paradox is aware of this after my email to them a few days ago, so hopefully they will get them in.

It expands an already fun game, with more features people have directly wanted and requested. You can't knock them for that and it’s been a blast to play, figuratively and literally—what’s that in the sky—oh crap.

I’ve had masses of fun trying out all the different disasters in the game and it really does make the game feel a lot more interesting. It’s a nice change of pace for an otherwise slow simulation game.

For fun, I destroyed a Dam with a meteor just to watch the water come gushing down and take out parts of the city and it was really quite amazing to watch what happened. My only real issue is with the water physics, as it appears to be really slow to update at times. It took a good while for the water to properly realize the Dam was gone for all the water to come gushing down, but once it did it was sure a sight to see. I was zooming in and out all over the place to get an idea of the scale of destruction and it was immense.

It’s well worth picking up. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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5 comments

Kimyrielle Nov 29, 2016
Odd, it doesn't show up in Steam for me yet.
Kimyrielle Nov 29, 2016
Oh well, it's up now. I guess I shouldn't check for new releases over my morning coffee. :D

Aaaand bought it.

The water physics were always a tad slow and felt off, btw. Probably a performance limitation?
Philadelphus Nov 30, 2016
I remember reading from the developer diaries that the water simulation is actually quite detailed and deep, in fact one of the developers has like a Masters or a Ph.D. in fluid-dynamics simulation, but the trade-off is that it has to happen pretty slowly to support the required calculations without grinding the whole machine to a halt. I've done 3D-fluid simulations with Blender before and it is intense, so I can well believe that speed was a trade-off.

Also, as an astronomer the asteroid-detection telescopes make me happy. :D Now you just need the ability to launch gravity tugs to coax them out of the way if you find them early enough…
Kimyrielle Nov 30, 2016
I thought all you'd ever need to shove an asteroid out of the way was a nuke and Bruce Willis. oO
tomtomme Dec 1, 2016
Nice. Even without any DLC I got a 1.6 GB bis update indluding much better performance (maybe they upgradet to unity 3D 5.4).
My 8 core amd fx [email protected] now shows around 60% cpu usage in my city of 250,000 people while the sim is not paused. If paused it shows 30% usage. Both is much more than before, so the threading improved and seems to use all my cores now to different degrees.
Gameplay is much smoother and hovers between 20 and 40 fps at 4k resolution everything maxed out (gpu fury x), depending on the zoom level. Before it hoverd between 10 and 30 fps.
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