Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters (Xbox One) Review

Thunder cracks and rain falls, rivers burst and wildfires rage in the distance; nature at its most dangerous is something that has been the most alluring feature of both the real Earth people live upon and city building sims. The days of building up an empirical city with immaculate tax records and low crime rates and smashing them down with storms is back. With this new DLC, the ability to "Disasterify" your city is here, featuring disasters from tornadoes to tsunamis.

The catharsis of building the perfect city and keeping it that way is the crux of the city simulator experience. It's what brought people to the genre to begin with. However, building and managing the perfect city with the change of natural disasters is even more exciting. The way that this approaches it is rather special, allowing players to build up disaster response functionality, including shelters and response headquarters, the latter of which is a very fancy building! These shelters require players to supply food, power, and water to them, alongside manually alerting civilians to hide from disasters there.

The way it works is the disaster response headquarters alerts the player to incoming disasters (unless one isn't built and the player decides to fend for themselves), at which point an evacuation warning can be issued and those in control can ensure they are prepped for the repairs, which can be expensive. If the disasters aren't doing enough damage, gamers can actually place them in sandbox mode and deliberately tear their city down with earthquakes and meteors. This is extremely fun, especially if the citizens in your city are unhappy with the city management.

This extra layer of gameplay is actually very exciting and comes with pretty much no drawbacks, aside from the fact it is DLC, not just something the game came pre-packaged with. For the cost, however, it's worth a buy from fans of the base, at the very least, so they can experience the added depth.