LEGO Skylines is the new plastic city-builder from Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath developers Iceflake Studios, published by Paradox Interactive. I've played an hour or so of a preview build, just long enough to devise a circular highway of coffee shops, glass-fronted houses, unaccountably cheerful farms, and playgrounds poking up haphazardly like fungus. Kind of like the M25, but more rustickal. There's a park in the middle that can't work out which century it's in, with an ornamental fountain every ten paces to baffle the casual stroller.
It's a jolly and confusing little Legoland, one I was sad to say goodbye to, when the preview access ended, but I confess, LEGO Skylines as a whole leaves me distinctly… whelmed. As a city-builder, it's rather gentle and overfamiliar: you've got residences, businesses and utilities that need to be linked up by roads, with prosperity translating to citizen happiness. But more importantly, I would just like to build my LEGO city brick by brick. Instead, the game gives you prefabs you can then customise at length with hot tubs, flowerbeds, letterboxes and so on, which seems a glorified half-measure. Why aren't they letting me go full hog as a master builder? Don't these people know I once made a whole human hand out of M:Tron pieces, with working joints and finger-tip magnets?
I imagine a lot of lifelong LEGO enthusiasts will feel similarly. And would you believe, the idea did occur to Iceflake earlier in development. But then Iceflake realised that assembling a LEGO building using a mouse and keyboard isn't quite as enjoyable as doing so with good old plastic blocks, especially when you have a city to run.
"We did discuss brick by brick building and things like that," producer Joanna Ronkanen told our Julian during a demo at Gamescom this year, "but we realised that it is quite a lot of work for even just players to place brick by brick." She illustrated her point by waving a LEGO model of a park bench from the demo booth. "Even just this little thing has like probably 50 bricks. We wanted to make sure that we're on the correct level of customisation." Ronkanen feels the game's template-based approach is "a quite beautiful compromise, in my opinion. You get to do a lot of stuff, you get to customise a lot."
Game director Lasse Liljedahl, meanwhile, offered the reassurance that the game's ideas about bricks do get more elaborate, later in the game. "There's more things we will show a little bit later, and talk about other features that we're not yet ready to talk about," he said. "This is a Paradox game and this is a LEGO game, so the customisability is one of the core pillars in this game, what you can do yourself with LEGO bricks in the game is something that will come a little bit later." Intriguing. There's also the prospect of official support for mods that might allow for more in-depth building, with Ronkanen adding that "we're not really talking about any modding solutions at this point yet."
I think part of the reason I'd like to see brick-by-brick building in LEGO Skylines is the havoc it might wreak on the game's otherwise straightforward city-building systems, like electricity production or the distinction between a residence and a workplace. One can assemble many things out of LEGO. Many terrible, wonderful things.
I think it would be extremely entertaining to watch the game's economic systems attempt to rationalise, say, a Tower of Babel made up of a thousand load-bearing hot tubs, or a contorted, gap-toothed ruin of the kind you get when you really want to build a city but there just aren't enough cornerpieces and six-by-eights in the damn box. Or a city that consists of restlessly flexing, alarmingly magnetic repurposed spaceship components. Yeah, let's see you estate agents devise service charges for a burg like that.