Cities: Skylines Parklife. 4.08 1,550 332 (21%) 8-10 h. Parklife Achievements. The Parklife Add-on for Cities: Skylines has 8 achievements worth 140 gamerscore. Achievement View.

As with most things in Cities: Skylines, learning how to integrate the new mechanics and systems from the 'Parklife' DLC into your city can be a case of trial and error ... mostly error.

1. Parklifeis the sixthexpansion pack to Cities: Skylines. Parklifewasreleased for Windows, OS X, and Linux on May 24, 2018. 1 Features 2 Gallery 2.1 Images 2.2 Media 3 References Parks and Recreation: Use the new park area tool to create park districts wherever there is empty land, and new city services like Park Maintenance, which boosts happiness and effectiveness and helps level up parks.
2. Parklife is the 6th expansion pack for Cities: Skylines. It was announced on 2018-04-18 and was released on 2018-05-24 alongside Country Road Radio and Patch 1.10.
3. As with most things in Cities: Skylines, learning how to integrate the new mechanics and systems from the 'Parklife' DLC into your city can be a case of trial and error.

After all, not only do you have the option to build new park types, treat them like a proper district for the first time, and play an impromptu game of Parkitect inside your metropolis, but there are sightseeing bus tours, new game mechanics involving noise reduction, a bunch of new maps, and some resources for modders.

I won't go into the modder resources; that stuff flies five miles over my head and is a subject you'll want to go to Skylines' existing modding community to get your head around. I'm a writer, not a coder or a programmer or a game designer.

Likewise, the free patch updates can best be summarized as “trees now reduce noise pollution, and the greater the concentration of trees, the greater the effect -- so plant forests between stuff like windmills and your city proper.” And new maps, of course, mean new, fun places to build cities on, all of which work just fine with other DLC, and all of which are just begging you to build a brand-new city to take full advantage of the new features.

Now then, there are two main features to get to grips with here: park districts and sightseeing tours.

Park Districts

We begin with the bread and butter. Creating a park area is as simple as drawing it in exactly the same way you draw any other district in your city:

You then choose what kind of park you want. Your choices are City Park (something roughly akin to Central Park in New York City, with walking trails, activities, and trees and such), Nature Reserve (perfect for those parts of the map where the terrain makes it impractical for zoning), Zoo (animals!), and Amusement Park (a place with all the zip of Nuka-Cola.)

Ultimately, which one you choose depends on your play style.

Once you've drawn the district, you'll need a Main Entrance; this can be found in the standard Parks interface, where you'll notice some new tabs, one for each of the different park types. Click around and experiment; Skylines is not a game that benefits from a linear “do this, this, and this” attitude.

Main gates must have a road connection; you then build park paths to direct walking traffic through the park. You can also build side gates to allow more access points into the park, useful for preventing traffic backups near the park's main entryway.

At first, you'll only be able to place a couple of basic structures, and here is where leveling up enters into it.

Once your park reaches a certain entertainment rating and has received enough visitors, you can level it up, but you can't just plunk down a bunch of the same structure and expect it to work; there's a diminishing returns mechanic in play.

Instead, beautification matters. In a park district, trees, landscaping, and other means of making the land more attractive also add entertainment value. But the bar is set low enough that you don't need to go overboard.

Furthermore, the main gate allows you to set an admission price. The more attractive the park, the higher the price you can charge; the larger the tourist volume and population in your city, the larger the potential customer base.

Or you can make the park free and treat it as a loss leader for attracting people to other city services. The choice is again yours, but costs add up, especially in big parks and at higher levels. The game automatically raises the price for you about 20 percent at each level-up, and that seems a reasonable step size.

Policies, 'Parklife' Style

'Parklife' includes policies that can be set for each park district. They work exactly the same way as district policies already in place in the game. It's precisely the same mechanic.

Policies include Animal Ethics for zoos, Advertising Campaigns to increase park visitor volume (especially useful when you've got the park up to the right entertainment value to level up but haven't quite cleared the visitor level bar), and setting a park as the Main Park so tourists prefer it, essentially saying to would-be visitors “this is why you'll want to come to the city.'

There's even a park policy that improves non-DLC parks, the ones that have always been in the game, taking a bit of your treasury and satisfaction even higher than ever before.

Do you district? You know this stuff already. So have fun with it; Colossal Order made it user-friendly.

New Park Services

There's also a new building: the Park Maintenance building.

Not only does it work on the 'Parklife' stuff, but it also adds a new booster to previous parks like Japanese gardens and basketball courts, giving them a boost to attractiveness as long as they're within the catchment area of the maintenance building.

But for 'Parklife' buildings, the maintenance crews create a level that's on a slider in any given building's feedback to let you know how much of a bonus the object is getting.

Done correctly, this is a key part of keeping those entertainment and attractiveness values high enough to climb that level tree.

New Buildings!

Besides the maintenance building, there are also new DLC-specific buildings with their own requirements, which unlock based on what you do with your parks.

Most of them unlock at Level 6 unique buildings (the Small City milestone), and as with all other unique buildings, the game outright tells you what you need to do once you reach that point in order to complete the unlock.

The more interesting one, however, is the Castle of Lord Chirpwick; this one doesn't unlock until you've built all of the 'Parklife' unique buildings, and besides nightly fireworks shows (which look awesome if you've got the day/night cycle enabled and a decent computer), it increases all other Unique Building attractiveness by 25 percent while raising the city's profile for tourists.

Lord Chirpwick offers a huge reward; if you're playing 'Parklife,' do everything you can to unlock the castle and make your entire purchase worth the while. Just know that it's like any other monument in the game in that you can't take your eye off the ball of making a great city to rush for it.

See the Sights!

There are two kinds of sightseeing tours: walking tours and bus tours.

They both work on the same principle, using existing public transportation mechanics; if you've created a bus line in your city, you have the know-how to make a sightseeing tour.

The difference is that unlike public transit, which is about getting people between their homes and their jobs, the value of a stop on a sightseeing tour is in the attractiveness of the landmarks you push your visitors past.

Which means if you have some well-placed parks in your city, you can line them up for people to visit them, amplifying their effect.

You can also create hot air balloons; these don't have routes, they just take to the air and view the city from above. Of course, the montgolfieres will stay in the general area of their launch pad, so if you put them near unique buildings, parks, and other high-attractiveness areas, you'll get the most satisfaction out of them.

Using these is simple and a great revenue source, and tours also improve the effectiveness of the locations they're guided past.

A New Way to Manage Tourism

Finally, Skylines has given the player a deeper dive into the data for how tourism is affecting the city.

Much like any other info panel, color-coded markers on the map show where the highest-appeal buildings are, making it easy to plan sightseeing tours around them.

Indeed, you're going to want to consult this view when you're working in that mode, because that's the only way you'll be able to visualize whether your efforts are working or just chewing through your money.

Plus, the budget panel now lets you know how much money tourists are spending and where they're spending it.

As with all things in Skylines, this is something players who have started to climb the learning curve already know; data visualization is how you stay on top of things in this game, from where the water pipes are to how hard the wind's blowing to, now, where the tourist traps are and whether any actual tourists are being trapped.

It's the glue that holds the whole strategy together, so make use of it.

But wait, there's more! The dev team added new assets clearly marked as tourism assets. Notice a bunch of campers, vans, and the like parked near your attractions? That's the game's way of telling you folks drove in just to see whatever their vehicles are parked in front of.

It's all holistic so you're not constantly in menu mode if you know what to look for.

And tourists themselves are now simulated much the same way as your Cims always have been, going about their business and able to be followed and tracked to get a good idea of their flow around your city.

Some Final Thoughts

Getting the most out of Skylines or any of its DLC involves knowing what's there, playing around with it until you get a good sense of how it works, then integrating it into your own strategy.

You can do as much or as little of this as you want, of course, but if you're paying for the content, you might as well use it.

So happy hunting! Leave a comment with a screenshot of your city's own Castle of Lord Chirpwick, and stick with GameSkinny for even more info on 'Parklife' and other Cities: Skylines guides.

Parklife, Cities: Skylines’ sixth expansion, launched to much acclaim in summer of 2018. It freshened up the formula, added systems we hadn’t seen before and gave us expansive parks that can define, or redefine, whole parts of the city.

The free patch

Patch 1.10, which released alongside Parklife, was a hefty bug-fixing update. It addressed issues including balance with every prior expansion and the base game. It also improved the UI, made it easy to unearth more data and added new models for tourists, among other things.

Perhaps most significant was that noise got an overhaul. With 1.10, trees now dampen noise, meaning you can put loud buildings like stations closer to residential areas by ringing them with trees. Beautification itself got easier with lots of new trees and rocks added.

The new parks are the big thing here, as you’d expect. They’re a totally new system that operates quite differently from anything else in the game. You start by drawing a park similar to a district. Once you’ve placed a main gate (ideally near transit connections), you’re away. You can draw paths through the park and place buildings and props wherever you like.

Each building contributes an entertainment value. The higher the value the more people will visit. Hit visitor counts and the park will upgrade up to level 5. Each level unlocks new buildings for the park.

The level of detail you can go into is huge. You’ll find yourself tinkering with bin and sign placement, laying hedges and benches, and choosing between normal tables or ones with chess boards on top. Not because you need to, but because you can.

I found that Parklife really got me interested in the sort of detailing I’d not paid much attention to before. My cities are a far, far, far cry from some of the hyper-realistic stuff that gets posted on the Reddit, but I realised how far a bit of time spent on aesthetics can go.

The new buildings are well designed, with great animations and sound design. Swoop over your zoo or theme park and you’ll hear roars or thronging crowds. It begs you to just sit back and watch.

Park buildings aren’t exclusive their park type, either. Once you’ve unlocked them, you’re free to mix and match. Some of the amusement park buildings work very nicely in a bigger city park, and nature reserve buildings suit zoos, assuming you’re going for a big ethically sound zoo out on the edge of town that is.

Because you’ve carefully placed each building yourself there’s a real sense of ownership over the parks, something that you don’t get from normal zoned buildings.

I don’t want to overstate the level of micromanagement here, though. You’ve got total freedom to lay each park as you like, but other than setting policies and ticket prices there’s not much else to do but enjoy watching it work. It would be hard to call it a ‘minigame’, then. But the playstyle is so different that it kind of feels that way.

City Parks are really handy for awkward spaces in the middle of your cities. You might not want to squeeze a whole new district in there, and leaving it empty can sometimes just look a bit weird. By adding some fences, gates, cafes and benches, you’ve suddenly got a busy and attractive focal point from nothing. And one that will make money, too.

Although income shouldn’t be overstated, either. They do make money, but they won’t be big income generators. But that doesn’t really matter – money is easy to come by in Cities.

When I wrote about Snowfall, I talked about how it was a shame that seasons weren’t integrated into non-winter maps. That goes the other way, too. A fifth park type – a ski or winter sports resort – would have been incredible. It would have given everyone a reason to make a new winter city, and probably sold a bunch of copies of the older DLC, offsetting the costs of making it (maybe).

What else is new?

Parks are the headline and most of the new stuff is gated within them, but there are other additions. The six new unique buildings are a mixed bag. The huge Colossalus, Sea Fortress and Old Market Street are tricky to use, because their size and styling mean they tend to dominate what’s around them. The latter would work great in a European-themed old town though.

Sightseeing buses are new, as are walking tours. Both give your tourists extra things to do, although I never succeeded in making the former profitable.But it’s nice to have extra systems and visual variety.

There’s also a new Monument: the impressive Castle of Lord Chirpwick. Once built, all unique buildings in the city get a healthy 25% boost to their attractiveness, supercharging your tourism without being too unbalanced.

A stack of new policies arrive as well, including ones to control the fireworks display each park will put on above its main gate at night and let you improve animal welfare at the zoo.

New found freedom

Without Parklife it’s possible, of course, to design park areas – especially nature reserve type areas. What Parklife does is give you vast numbers of props, buildings and paths – as well as a gameplay reason for creating them.

Once they’re built, everything you lay within them, from cafes to rollercoasters, is attractive to visitors and especially to tourists.

Being able to place them along paths is a revelation, too. Park buildings snap to footpaths of any kind, while props – like tents and canoes – can be placed anywhere. This gives us a kind of freedom that wasn’t available before. For me, it changed the feel of the game in an entirely positive way.

Freedom cuts both ways, of course. It’s possible to totally screw up your new parks. Just as I screwed up my first few cities, my first few parks were pretty ugly. Once I’d got a park to level 5 and unlocked everything, I had a better idea of how everything should fit together – and got better at planning future ones.

Parklife: is it worth buying?

It’s difficult to find fault with the pack. Everything feels well executed. I’d have liked some love for the winter maps but that’s a wider criticism rather than a problem with Parklife specifically.

As I write this, the seventh expansion – Industries – is about to arrive. It’s a testament to the success of the park drawing and upgrading that the new industrial areas look like they’re based on the same system.

I think what makes Parklife so special is that the parks I design, whether they’re beautiful nature reserves or wild amusement parks, often end up defining whole regions. In lots of cases, they’re among the things I’m most proud of in the city. They give incentives for beautifying an area and they contribute to the city’s attractiveness and pull in tourists.

As you’ll probably see from other articles I write, I really prize variety whenever Colossal Order have added it to the game. And Parklife adds that in spades. The parks are distinct and characterful and bring things to life.

For all those reasons, I think Parklife is an essential expansion, and always features at or near the top of my list of recommendations.

Cities Skylines Parklife Review

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