The Sky Is The Limit With The City-Building Potential Of LEGO Skylines

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LEGO Skylines is an ambitious take on the city-building genre that will surprise longtime fans of the toys and the genre. LEGO lends itself naturally to the city-builder genre, given that countless imaginary cityscapes have been built in the real world and in digital spaces over the years. Even compared to previous attempts, though, LEGO Skylines is in another world entirely.

The game has a truly staggering sense of scope, paired with quietly deep design elements, giving players plenty of options to experiment with their own settings and worlds. Screen Rant attended a Gamescom preview event hosted by the game’s development team, which highlighted just how expansive and impressive the new city-builder is.

Create Your Own World, Brick By Brick

LEGO Skylines official screenshot showing a bustling city

LEGO Skylines may have the traditional cutesy design aesthetic fans expect from the LEGO brand, but it’s not meant to be seen as a children’s game. The underlying city-building mechanics have a lot of depth, even if they’ve been adjusted to fit the goofy tone and sweet sense of imagination integral to the building blocks.

“This is a LEGO game that is targeted for adults,” the team explained to the assembled press who were there for the demo. “It’s something that anyone can look at and play, but the level of complexity is where you need to be a little bit more prone to understanding how to play with all the systems.“

Still, the LEGO collaboration was key to the experience. While the city-building might contain a lot of depth — and the sheer scale of the world map is staggering in the late-game — it’s also been streamlined enough to be an especially accessible city builder. While the game takes lots of cues from City Skylines in terms of raw mechanics, it’s designed to be picked up and played with ease.

That complexity goes beyond the mechanics alone, as the full scope of the graphics allows for millions of individual blocks. Zooming in on your creation reveals that each part of the city being built by the players is constructed with actual LEGO pieces and connections. According to the team, the game can have 12 million individual bricks rendered at any given time.

The team noted that other LEGO games often capped out around 10,000 bricks, a fraction of the scale LEGO Skylines can showcase at any given time. It speaks to the natural ambition of Iceflake Studios and Paradox Interactive in crafting a game that really feels like the ultimate digital extension of what LEGO can be.

The demo opened with a small island, where players were tasked with creating a small town. Within minutes, the few houses had expanded to farms, stores, and parks. It was a sweet, scenic setting, with small personal challenges set by the town’s inhabitants to keep the challenge up. The result was a game experience that was quick to learn but almost dizzying in its innate depth.

The Scope And Future Of LEGO Skylines

LEGO Skylines official screenshot showing a home being built

The demo for LEGO Skylines was meant as a taste of the game’s full scope, largely keeping players in a single island space. Towards the end of the showcase, the dev team loaded a later save state to reveal the game’s full scope, showing just how massive the endgame could be.

Players were introduced to truly massive islands bursting with life. Scrolling across the ocean of interconnected islands and cities revealed dozens of locations, hinting at the pure volume of options available to players. “It’s rooted in modern cities and modern-day elements,” the team noted, explaining that there isn’t really a drive to introduce different eras or bizarre visions at this time.

“That’s what all the mechanics and features are built around. You need to be creative; there’s a lot of content that allows you to create cities that look very different and diverse. You can play however you want. If you have a vision, you should be able to create it in the game.” That level of flexibility and player agency was crucial to the team and something the LEGO team fully supported.

LEGO is all about creativity. That was our north star during development.

“We’ve been fans of LEGO since our childhood,” the team explained, “and we carried that into this game.” The team embraced the LEGO brand’s influence and inspiration, leaning heavily into the property’s cartoonish aspects to charming effect. While the game is rooted in the real world, the cities have a distinct tone and style.

However, the vast scope of IP associated with LEGO has expanded plenty over the years. While there are no confirmed plans for direct tie-ins to those properties, the LEGO Skylines team may be aware of the possibility. “We have a lot of possibilities,” the team admitted, while acknowledging there are no current plans for crossovers with other IP.

“It’s somewhat restricted right now because of the LEGO system we’re following. Within that system, you have 2.6 billion bricks and hundreds of companies. You can put all that together. There are infinite possibilities. That’s what LEGO is all about.” That sense of creativity is baked into every brick of LEGO Skylines, which might be a crucial pick for city-building fans.