DLC Review: Mass Transit Quietly Rounds Out Cities: Skylines' Season Pass

It’s another day, another DLC for Cities: Skylines. Mass Transit is the last full expansion of the game’s season pass and is arguably the best-value of them, bolstering Colossal Order’s already sizeable public transport options. However, despite all of these new additions, the DLC’s £10 price tag is still a too steep for what it offers.

In order to keep your city ticking over, Mass Transit adds four new modes of public transport. Ferries, cable cars, monorails, and blimps are all now on offer and useful in their own ways. Ferries are helpful if your city is based on islands, while cable cars and monorails are especially useful in built-up areas.

However, as with the trams in the Snowfall DLC, you’ll have to lay all-new monorail-compatible roads if you’ve already built your city up, which can be a little frustrating if you don’t want to start over. Blimps, too, are a little unnecessary and aren’t particularly useful, although they can help when combined with a newly-added policy involving them that increases your citizens’ education.

The coolest new content, however, has to be the new transit hubs. As well as new multiplatform train stations and end of the line stations which can be combined with bus and metro routes, there are also hubs that allow you to interlink ferry and bus routes, monorail and bus routes, and metro, monorail, and train routes among others. As well as saving valuable space and adding convenience for your citizens, it makes mass transport planning much easier. It’s a pretty helpful addition.

After that, though, Mass Transit is a bit thin on the ground, just like the other Cities: Skylines expansions. As always, three new maps and three new scenarios have been added – one in particular, in which you have to fix a city filled with clogged roads and traffic jams, is particularly fun – but that’s about it, apart from a few small touches like the fact that all roads are now automatically named. There are new road types, bridges, and the like, but they’re small potatoes and probably could’ve been added in a patch.

Mass Transit is a great DLC for any Cities: Skylines fan still interested in playing, but again its price tag is too expensive for what it adds. The fact that it’s called Mass Transit and yet doesn’t contain trams, which were instead bundled into the barebones Snowfall expansion, seems a little off too – the two DLCs could’ve easily been combined.

If you’re interested in Mass Transit, it’s probably best to wait for a sale – knock about a third off of the price and it seems much more reasonable. Even as part of the £32 season pass (which includes all three major expansions and a few smaller content packs) it doesn’t represent good value. As a final DLC for the Cities: Skylines for the time being, Mass Transit adds some worthwhile content, but it feels like more of a whimper than a bang.

Will you be catching a train and trying out Cities: Skylines' Mass Transit expansion pack? Pray for no delays in the comments section below.