Parents' Guide to Cities: Skylines

Whether you enjoy this city simulator ultimately has to do with how much you like futzing with the tiniest of details. For example, each and every time you chart out a road, you must decide whether it has an incline and if so, how steep; if not, should it be a two-lane, four-lane, or six-lane. These details cascade and stack, so it'll only be another hour or two before you recognize why that wasn't the move to make. Suddenly, you'll find that more people have moved in and traffic in that area is creating too much noise pollution, triggering a chain effect in other districts. It's a game where strategy is important, and patience is key.

Newcomers will be intimidated by the sheer amount of strategy you'll need to wrap your head around. For example, public policies can be shifted or reversed, if you want, during the nighttime. Different rules can be in effect during the day. Then there's poring over the ledger and tweaking taxes, finessing your budget, and deciding whether you should go green, use coal, or use less eco-friendly power sources. It's all a manic sort of fun, and it will take a few games before you start to survive without being tempted to cheat and continually take out loans to stay afloat. All of this is further complicated by the fact that there's practically no content in the tutorial, so you'll rely on a lot of trial and error, along with multiple gameplay sessions, to figure out how to actually be successful. The difficulty in itself should be enough to give people pause, but on top of that, the game's insistence on having realistic graphics creates an eye-straining effect. You can play for hours and hours if you really want to, but taking in that much detail just gets difficult. All in all, it's a fun and soothing way to spend an evening -- until suddenly catastrophe strikes and you'll have learned a valuable, though costly, lesson for the next time you start building a city.