As pretty as Cities: Skylines is, getting a read on your city's problems can take some digging. While traffic jams are immediately visible, prompting you to start reorganising the layout of your streets and bypasses, other issues only make themselves known when you switch on overlays or bring up a stats screen. Changing that is one developer Iceflake Studios aims for colourful plastic brick-based spinoff Lego Skylines.

"If there's an issue, it should be visible in the world," game director Lasse Liljedahl tells me. "Everything that you need to worry about or manage is something you should see while zooming in and zooming out and not digging deep in statistics or information screens. That's the goal."

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You probably don't need me to recap the difficult life Cities: Skylines 2 has had since hitting the streets in 2023. Plagued by performance issues and prompting questions over whether its additions made it a worthy sequel right out of the gate, thus followed years of tweaks aiming to undo the damage. Eventually, original developers Colossal Order handed over the game and series' reins to Iceflake Studios, with Paradox Interactive staying on as publishers.

The latter two have now revealed the next game in the Skylines series - a brick-built city builder dubbed Lego Skylines. It's not a bad name, but surely they could have gone with Lego Cities.

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