Lego Skylines Hands-On Preview: It’s a Cozy, More Relaxing City-Builder

Key Preview Takeaways:

• You don’t build with individual bricks; instead, you assemble your city with pre-fabricated buildings however you see fit.
• It’s cozy and chill, but not entirely so, as your citizens will still present you problems that need solving.
• There are plenty of deeper gameplay systems to dig into if you want to.

I love Legos. When I was a kid, my parents would always buy me a set or two for Christmas, and we’d spend part of the day putting it together forever. It was always the more outlandish stuff: pirates and castles and Aquasharks over real-life things, but I did have this pizza delivery truck I adored. This was before Legos largely became all about licensed properties, but the freedom to build whatever you want, however you want, has never really left.

Lego Skylines is all about that, and after spending about an hour with it at Gamescom, I’m excited to play more of it. My demo started simply enough: I was a Master Builder who had come to a little island and run into a family that needed a new house. Since this is a video game, their problems were my problems, and I built them a house. But you know what they say about giving a minifigure a house. Well, they’ll want more. Soon I was sprucing up their yard, building a road, and a place for them to work. And after that, I was on my way to building a whole city.

Let me be clear: this isn’t a brick-by-brick thing. I’m choosing from pre-built houses and buildings (and there are several varieties of each) and watching them come together, piece by piece, at incredible speed. But the cool thing, according to the developers at Iceflake Studios, is that every building in Lego Skylines is built from real Lego bricks in real configurations, and you can see them if you decide, for whatever reason, to demolish something you’ve built. If you have the right pieces, you could build everything in Skylines yourself. That’s awesome.

For me, city builders are more about making a beautiful pattern than making a city that works. Generally, I make my city and then worry about making it a place that functions. As you can imagine, that sometimes gets me into trouble. If you’re like me and looking for something a little less… punishing, shall we say, Lego Skylines might fit the bill. The developers described it to me as a cozier, simpler city builder. You’ll still have problems – crime, fires, you know, the things cities deal with – but you’ll have time to solve them. This isn’t a situation where things will start collapsing immediately if you don’t take care of them. There won’t be Lego minifigures roaming the streets with pitchforks and torches because they don’t have healthcare.

What that means is you can kind of build your city how you want to. One of the developers I spoke to told me she focuses on building a cozy city until problems start piling up. Another told me he starts with taking care of what needs to happen first and foremost and then worries about making it pretty afterwards. Whatever you want to do is fine.

What I really appreciated, though, was just how many options I had and how complex things could get if I really wanted to dig. If I wanted to attract people, I needed jobs, which meant places for them to work, which meant roads to take them there. And if I wanted people to visit those fine establishments, I had to advertise them (billboards!) and make them more appealing (Statues! Flowers! Fountains!). The same was true of any house, too, and I could always click on a resident or building and figure out what issues needed solving or if they were happy with things the way they were.

After I spent a while building up my own town, I played the second part of the demo, which took me to a finished city, and man, it was impressive in a “how on Earth would you build this?” sort of way. But that’s the thing, right? Building a city is a process, and like real cities, they change all the time. You might move a building, add a road, add a park. Stores go up and come down. Cities and towns are living things that grow and change and shrink and decay and live and die alongside their populace. It’s impossible for me to imagine New York as anything other than what it is right now, but it wasn’t always that way. It didn’t sprout out of the ground. People built it, and it changed with us. Lego Skylines gets that.

Once I got over the decision paralysis of, “Oh my God, look how big this is, what would I even do here?” I noticed that some folks really wanted more educational opportunities, so I built a university just outside of the city and a road to get people there. It wasn’t much, but I’d made the city better.

My demo ended shortly after that, but I walked away from it eager to come back and build a prettier (and more functional) pattern. The beauty of a city builder is you can do whatever you want, and Lego Skylines’ kinder, gentler approach – combined with the inherent appeal of building a city out of Legos – seems like it will scratch that itch. It might not be as cool as building Legos with your family on Christmas, but you can still make something beautiful if you try.

While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!

• Grand Theft Auto 6
• Fable
• Metro 2039
• Gears of War: E-Day (campaign)

Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.