There’s always been something quite appealing to me about the typical city-building video game. The idea of being the architect of my own, rich and thriving community. The designer of roads, neighbourhoods and parks. Shouldering the burden of making sure that every one of my citizens is happy, healthy and – most importantly – thinks I’m cool. But each time that I’ve dabbled in something like the Cities Skylines series I’m reminded of how complex and challenging urban planning actually is, and the realities of properly managing and maintaining any kind of public infrastructure quickly get in the way of the bits I enjoy.
Enter LEGO Skylines, which is exactly what it sounds like – a brick-built take on Paradox Interactive and Iceflake Studios’ Cities Skylines series that introduces a bit of that LEGO charm and accessibility for a city builder more focused on fun.
I was recently lucky enough to get hands-on with LEGO Skylines right after its big reveal during Gamescom 2026’s Opening Night Live showcase, and something that immediately stood out to me is that this isn’t being positioned as “Cities Skylines for kids”. Rather, this is Cities Skylines for adult LEGO enthusiasts and folks exactly like me who crave a cozier city builder that still has a bit of depth. Speaking to some of the development team at Gamescom, it’s very much been likened to a “black box” 18+ LEGO set – something that younger fans could certainly manage with some guidance, but aimed squarely at fun-loving adults.
The bulk of my time was spent with LEGO Skylines’ tutorial section, which is always a good place to start with these things. What’s interesting here is that your time with the game kicks off all the way down at street level, as a steady but manageable stream of tutorials starts by asking you to manage the needs of just one household. First they need a house, naturally, of which there are dozens of designs to choose from out of themed pools, and all can be further customised with colour schemes and decorations to make them truly unique. We haven’t even built a single road yet and I’m already thinking about spending hours on home designs.
But a single, beautiful brick-built homestead does not a city make, so pretty quickly you’ll be adding roads, neighbours, places for your minifigure citizens to work, eat, shop and learn. With each new bit of learning, you zoom out a little more to suit your increasing domain. Every step of this early section is presented as a mission to make someone happy, often having you interact directly with named characters who’ll describe to you their needs. It’s a vastly different onboarding experience to a more traditional city builder, much more in keeping with the world of LEGO video game charm and humour. Crucially, it’s setting you up to put your residents’ happiness at the forefront of everything you do, even when the scope eventually balloons out to megacities of potentially infinite size.
Again, had I all the time in the world I could’ve spent forever just in this zoomed-in portion, arranging and re-arranging my new little neighbourhood until it was as visually pleasing as functional. LEGO Skylines doesn’t like to get bogged down in bureaucracy or finances, allowing you to effortlessly build and move as much as you want, wherever and whenever you want. It’s the perfect angle on this spin-off, putting creation and creativity at the forefront of the experience while still keeping a compelling game experience underneath it all for those who want to seek it out.
After a while, I had a perfectly pleasant and self-sufficient little block under my care, with farms and mills for residents to work at and some quaint stores and restaurants to keep them entertained. I had a great time crafting my own stories – like the modern mansion that sits amongst some forested area just outside of the regular residential area, belonging to a wealthy recluse who owns the logging factory that supports the town. This is the stuff I love in these types of games.
After a while of doing this, the team on-hand stepped in to load me into a much more advanced save file, with a sprawling metropolis already built and bustling. This was great for illustrating just how massive and complex your cities will eventually become, and how cool something like this looks in brick-built form. It’s maybe less great for diving in with minimal experience, skipping over tutorials for the staple management bits like using heat maps to isolate and work on problem areas in your jurisdictions. But in continuing the accessible, LEGO approach, this game does some useful things to keep players on track and expanding.
One of those is something of a dynamic quest system, wherein if your city is lacking or struggling in a particular area, an NPC might appear that you can choose to interact with for a new task aimed at addressing the problem. In my city, for example, crime rates were up in some areas, and so a local police chief offered some goals to help shore up public safety. With a lot of the typical city builder considerations very much in play here – reliable power grids, good education in the right proximity, pollution control, public services and so on – it’s a great way to support newer players optionally, without straight up holding their hand.
It all goes a long way to make LEGO Skylines appealing to fans of the genre but especially, and importantly, to LEGO fans. It should go without saying but there’s something incredibly appealing about creating and enjoying these brick-built municipalities and admiring the virtual build work. Like a lot of modern LEGO video games, everything here is a “legal” build, meaning the studio worked with LEGO designers to ensure that what you see is physically possible to build at home with real, available elements. The developers were tight-lipped about any actual commercial LEGO models making it into the game, but I did spot at least one which hasn’t made its way into pre-release media, so look forward to that. I mean, the LEGO City theme is right there, you know?
It’s not easy to make too many early judgments about a game that will ask for a healthy investment of time to get the most out of, especially isolated from various potential campaign or sandbox modes. But from this small, initial taste I’m confident that LEGO Skylines will not only be my first real foray into a city builder but could wind up being one of my favourite LEGO titles to date.
Thanks to Paradox Interactive and The LEGO Group for having me at this behind-closed-doors Gamescom preview.
Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.