When comparing Oxygen Not Included vs Cities: Skylines, the Slant community recommends Cities: Skylines for most people. In the question“What are the best Simulation games on Steam?” Cities: Skylines is ranked 5th while Oxygen Not Included is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Cities: Skylines is:
At a total of 36sq.km of area to use (compared to SimCity 4), there is a large amount of room to build and play.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Realistic game mechanics
For a light-hearted game, Oxygen Not Included takes laws of physics and biology very seriously. Characters, or Duplicants, require regular meals and fresh water. They can hold their breath, but only for a limited time. Extremely cold and hot temperatures hurt them. Given high enough stress level, they can even experience nervous breakdown that causes them to vomit excessively or start binge-eating colonie's food supplies.
Pro Loveable, cute characters
Every Duplicant has a name and unique appearance, as well as personal traits. They are very cute and funny, which makes you fully invested in their well-being.
Pro Requires advanced planning
This game provides a real challenge when it comes to planning your base's inner layout. You need to take into account gas and fluid dynamics to ensure that your Duplicants have breathable air and aren't intoxicated by contaminated water.
Pro Large scale
At a total of 36sq.km of area to use (compared to SimCity 4), there is a large amount of room to build and play.
Pro Steady Stream of new content via DLCs
DLCs are optional, they do go one sale. Plus when a new DLC is released a bit of the content is released into the base game.
Pro Depth of field
There is a depth of field effect that will blur distant buildings, which mimics Sim City's diorama effect. It can of course be adjusted with a slider as to how much or little to use.
Pro Large Amount of Workshop Mods & Assets
With almost 150 thousand assets and mods, you can totally change the gameplay and look of the game
Cons
Con Maps are limited in size, causing you to eventually lose
Since the map size is limited, so is the supply of resources, meaning that sooner or later you invariably loose the game.
Con Resource Heavy
If your computer doesn’t have decent specs, don’t expect to be able to run this game smoothly.
Con Expensive
If you want more gameplay features, you have to buy expensive DLC, but you can get them on sale sometimes.
Con Can be difficult to glean what one has done wrong in game
Cities: Skylines has difficulty letting the player know what they have done wrong, which results in a lot of head scratching.