Cities Skylines: Industries expansion is easily the most ambitious expansion to date. It’s solely dedicated to improving the industry aspect of the game, but it also goes far beyond normal city simulation.

Previously, Cities had a lackluster industry component with tiny farms, factories, and no such thing as a warehouse. Now with Industries, each type of industry now has its own production tree. Agriculture, ore, oil, and forestry are the names of the game if you want to be an industry titan.

Each one of these types is broken down into gathering, then storage, then refinement. For example, you build a tree farm, have the logs stored in a storage yard, then either sold from there or transported to a factory you’ve build to be turned into one of the many products.

As you work higher up the tech tree for the type you can refine your product even further, resulting in a far more profitable yield than with the raw material.

At the highest end of tech, you will combine resources and products of multiple types, allowing you to further increase profits.

The idea of storing all these materials makes a lot of sense, from small storage lots to massive warehouses a la Amazon. These buildings can store only one type of product at a time, so you’ll have to be aware of space usage for multiple buildings.

This is very reminiscent of the storage lots available in SimCity 2015 (one of the things they did get right in that game).

Other things added are a postage system, which is another service where you need to build depots to distribute the citizens and businesses of your city. A new road type made specifically for industries has also been added.

The expansion pack somewhat changes how the game functions at a low level, it is less of a city simulator and more of a small dictatorship much like Tropical where the government (you) owns the means of production. Now, Cities isn’t really known for its hyper-realistic simulation and this expansion just further proves it. Though if you’re not a huge fan of resource management, maybe steer clear of this expansion, but if you are looking for even more fun content to work with, this is the expansion for you!

I have a full video of this review right HERE if you’d like to see it for yourself!