Cities: Skylines received its final piece of DLC last May, as developers Colossal Order shifted their focus to its sequel, Cities: Skylines 2. Eighteen months and the release of Cities: Skylines 2 later... Cities: Skylines 1 is getting new DLC again.
The "Mountain Village" creator pack add 45 new buildings designed to help you construct quaint and picturesque destinations.
]]>On account of not loads happening in the last week apart from the Actiblizz acquisition news, which I do not want to talk about under any circumstances, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast talks this week about DLC, because a couple of good games got some DLCs - good, but different games getting different kinds of DLC expansions. Thus we discuss DLCs in general and what the difference is between a live service game and a game that is supported with DLC for years. As usual, we all talk about what we've been playing - what's up with Redfall, y'all? - and have some recommendations. The mini-game this week is to imagine feeding beans to Quentin Tarantino.
]]>Cities: Skylines 2 was announced in March and is due for release later this year. As a result, the next expansion for Cities: Skylines is also its last. Hotels & Retreats is a "mini-expansion" that adds hostels, cabins, hotels and luxury resorts to make your city friendlier to tourists.
]]>After 8 years of mega city-building, developer Colossal Order are moving onto their sequel Cities: Skylines 2, but the first game isn’t done just yet. Paradox have announced a roadmap for Cities: Skylines which will receive its last few content drops over the next few months. After taking us to Korea, Cities: Skylines will continue its world tour with three new Content Creator Packs on March 22nd - next Wednesday - and a Colossal Order-developed mini-expansion in May.
]]>Cities: Skylines turns 8 years old next week, so Paradox are celebrating with a special announcement: a new Cities: Skylines. As part of today’s Paradox Announcement Show, the publisher revealed their urban management sequel Cities: Skylines 2, coming from the studio behind the first game, Colossal Order, is coming later this year.
]]>Publisher Paradox Interactive are preparing to announce three new games and four expansions at their Paradox Announcement Show airing next week - an announcement of an announcement if you like. The Paradox Announcement show will go live at 6pm CET/ 5pm GMT/ 9am PT on March 6th and you can catch the show on Paradox's official YouTube and Twitch channels.
]]>Another month, another fresh batch of Game Pass goodies. February’s PC Game Pass additions have plenty of variety and should appeal to fans of the following subjects: American ‘football’, the Dark Ages, stabbing Japanese demons, and shooting Soviet robots. February’s Game Pass picks kick off tomorrow with the online action-RPG SD Gundam Battle Alliance, and EA’s Madden NFL 23 - which corrupted a number of players’ saves last month.
]]>How time flies, eh? We were so busy putting together The RPS 100 last month (including the first ever Reader Edition), that we clean ran out of time to do another RPS Time Capsule. But fear not! Our written repository of games we've deemed worthy of saving from the eternal hell bin of the future has returned, and this time it's a good 'un. The year is 2015, folks, and cor, has there ever been a better year for video games? Of course, with only 11 slots to fill in our RPS Time Capsule, it also means we're having to say goodbye to some real gems. Come and see what's transcended to the higher plane of Capsule existence.
]]>Cities: Skylines is getting two tranches of new content before the end of the year. "Tranche" is a fitting word, too, since the largest update of the bunch is a Financial Districts mini-expansion which will let you build a Stock Exchange and invest in markets.
]]>More than any other citybuilder, Cities: Skylines requires deep engagement with its traffic simulation. You can spend an endless number of (very satisfied) hours tweaking your road network to try to fix traffic jams. The next Cities: Skylines expansion might offer an alternative, however. The Plazas & Promenades DLC, announced today, will allow you to create pedestrian streets and zones where cars dare not tread. Find the first trailer below.
]]>My favourite kind of Humble Bundle isn't a collection of games, most of which I'll never get round to playing. It's a bundle of a single game I like with lots and lots of discounted DLC.
Enter the Cities Skylines Colossal Collection, which offers up Cities: Skylines, 9 expansions and 21 add-ons for £16.22/$20/€18.95.
]]>The latest weekly giveaway on the Epic Games Store is a nice one, with Cities: Skylines free for keepsies if you grab it by next Thursday. First released in 2015, it's a city-building game that's quite nice to play around with, putting your utopian visions and public transport dreams into practice or simply seeing if you can do better than your local planners (council? more like clowncil, eh? right? eh? that's them told).
]]>A handful of popular Cities: Skylines mods have been banned from the Steam Workshop by developers Colossal Order. One, "Network Extensions 3", violates the Steam Subscriber Agreement by "discriminating against specific Steam users" blocking them from using it, Colossal Order say. Another mod, "Update From Github", aimed to circumvent the Steam Workshop entirely by allowing updates to mods to be installed directly form Github while "making changes to existing Workshop subscriptions without the user's knowledge."
Complicating matters somewhat is a sea of rumours about what else the mods contained, and a series of counter-allegations about Colossal Order from the creator of the mods.
]]>Cities: Skylines' Airports DLC is out now. It lets you build your own airports within your cities, placing down terminals, taxi lanes, customising the plane liveries and so on. It also comes alongside a free update for the base game which expands some substantial city customisation options.
]]>Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
]]>I always liked the idea that a citybuilder eventually comes to contain several other management games within it. Cities: Skylines takes another step in that direction with its next DLC, which will let you construct sprawling airports when it takes flight in January.
]]>Yesterday brought the announcement of Victoria 3, the first DLC for Empire Of Sin, and Royal Court DLC for Crusader Kings 3.
Yet here I am, having my head turned by two tiny packs for Cities Skylines. One adds a bunch of train stations, the other adds some piers and bridges. Gimme.
]]>Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077's humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn't want to bring up your children in.
]]>There's just over a week to go 'til giftsmas day - and while I'm sure we're all panicking over what to get our friends, loved ones and recurring villains, what's the harm in picking up a little treat for yourself? The Epic Games Store's holiday sale begins today, giving away a new free game for the next 15 days alongside the usual slew of store-wide deals. Your first gift is Cities: Skylines, with plenty more to come over the next two weeks.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Paradox Interactive are pitching in on Covid-19 coronavirus relief efforts with a sale on several of their big management games and RPGs until Friday, April 3rd. You can snag some mighty hefty discounts on things like Cities: Skylines, Pillars Of Eternity, and BattleTech. Paradox are committing proceeds from the sale to the World Health Organization's Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
]]>If you ever stared at the beautiful seas, lakes, and rivers around your cities in Cities: Skylines and thought "Surely I can monetise these as more than just dumping grounds for raw sewage?" you might want to check out the latest expansion. Launched today, Sunset Harbor adds new fishing industries to wring that wet silver from your waters. It has a grab bag of other new features too, and a new free update also arrived today with newness for all players.
]]>I've always thought Cities: Skyline's coasts were missing something. Now, I finally know what it was: it's the clanging of bells, the swaying of battered old boats and the scent of a fresh morning's catch. Today, Paradox announced Sunset Harbor, bringing some good ol' fashioned fishing to your city's industrial roster. More than just bringing a little bit of Berwick to Paradox's city-builder, Skyline's next DLC pack makes sweeping changes to public transport across land, sea and air when it arrives next week.
]]>I will forever be impressed with the imagination of players in creative games. I admire from afar grand Minecraft monuments, luxurious Sims 4 houses, and beautifully dense Stardew Valley farms but know that I'll never have the dedication to make any of them myself. User "Mr_Hemi" on Reddit has taken a page from the past and spent over a year building Detroit as it was envisioned by a city planner 200 years ago. They did it all in Cities: Skylines.
]]>After the blurry blue delights of last month's Sonic fest, those bundle fiends over at Humble have put together a brand new pack of game goodies for December, this time focusing on Paradox's best management games to celebrate the early access launch of Surviving the Aftermath. Ironically, Surviving the Aftermath did not, in fact, survive the cut to get into the bundle itself, but Humble's Paradox management bundle does include the most excellent Surviving Mars, Cities: Skylines and Prison Architect and all their various expansions for under $20.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>Laid-back city-builder Cities: Skylines today enters the period of supreme slack with the addition of universities in its latest expansion. 'Campus' is its name, and building campuses is its game. You too can establish fine educational establishments for students to doss about, build sports arenas for them to shout in, and shape your city's policies to enable their idleness. It's possible you may find some benefits to educating and occupying young people, I suppose. Their vomiting in the streets might sate seagulls who'd otherwise be mugging grannies for chips, for example.
]]>It’s time to pack your Cities: Skylines inhabitants off to uni, where they will surely get up to nothing but sombre study. There will be no mischief, though there may be some handegg, which is essentially the same thing. The update will include five sports, in fact, along with other faculties, new policies, and new maps. You can get a glimpse of some of it in the trailer below.
]]>OK, look, it isn't a Red Dead Redemption 2 edition, because Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't out for PC yet. But if I keep typing Red Dead Redemption 2 into this Google is going to be SO TRICKED and the clicks will pour in and Graham will give me a promotion!
]]>Until such time as we can seize the means of production and abolish capitalism, the smoggy skies introduced in Cities: Skylines's latest expansion - Industries - are just a fact of life. At least you can simulate it working in your favour, paying directly into your pocket. Released today, Colossal Order's new expansion lets you define your city's purpose in the world by creating goods and exporting them to neighbouring regions. There's a lot of new systems, five new resource-rich maps to plunder and a bundle of new buildings to construct. Greedily ogle the release trailer below.
]]>My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
]]>In the week that United Nations scientists declared we need to immediately make massive changes to society to avoid catastrophic climate change, Paradox have announced a new Cities: Skylines expansion focused on the smoke and thunder of industry. I suppose that's a dose of grim reality to counterbalance the utopian optimism of the game's earlier Green Cities expansion. And, Paradox say, Industries will be good for folks who want more city-management decisions in the largely easy-going and pleasant city-builder.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>I'm not sure if Valve's latest promotional wotsit on Steam knows whether it's coming or going. On one hand, it's nice that the Spring Cleaning Event (running until Monday, 28th May) is nudging players into trying out games they may have bought in sales and never touched, but pairing that with nine simultaneous free weekend events does somewhat undermine the message.
Ah well, it's an excuse to play videogames all weekend. Can't grumble about that. Plus, there's an actual free game giveaway running - take a peek within. Oh, and yesterday's big Steam giveaway is still live until tomorrow, so try that too. Oh dear, there's just too many games.
]]>Now that summer is near, Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order are taking a break from disasters and management to kick back with the Parklife expansion. Released today, it lets builders fancy up their cities with amusement parks, nature reserves, zoos, sightseeing bus tours, and other sources of summertime fun.
As with all the Paradox expansions, so many Paradox expansions, this goes hand-in-hand with a free update adding new features for all players. Expect new props for parks, new models for tourists, and loads of tweaks and fixes.
]]>It feels rare for a week to go by where Paradox don't announce another expansion for their growing stable of strategy and simulation sandboxes, but it's also hard to complain when they look as nice as Parklife, the next expansion for Cities: Skylines. Adding yet another direction for your perfect city to grow in, Parklife - unsurprisingly - spans parks of all kinds, from national forests full of hiking trails right up to cash-guzzling corporate theme parks, and it's due out next month.
]]>Cities: Skylines turned three a couple of weeks ago, meaning that it’s time to dust off our best Cities: Skylines mods list and see what wonderful community creations we can fill it with. On the day of its launch, Skylines already had pages and pages of buildings and complicated junctions waiting to be downloaded; now there are 1,000 of them, containing a ridiculous 145,948 mods.
That’s quite a lot of stuff to get through. And you should absolutely give Steam Workshop a browse -- you never know what you might find. If you don’t want to faff, however, I’ve gathered a bunch of the best, including some personal favourites that I can’t live without. Most of these mods will work with the base game, but there are a few you’ll need one of the expansions for, and remember to check for conflicts.
]]>Fancy building a little model city to coo at, watching little people and cars zipping around the streets you laid out? You can do that right now with Cities: Skylines, thanks to a free trial of the full game running until Sunday. Colossal Order's 2015's game is a pleasant little city-builder, one largely not mega-serious about crunching numbers and honing margins, and that's nice. Our Alec will tell you it's one of the best non-violent games but what about the violence of paving over meadows and choking rivers with bridges? Eh, Alec? Eh? You monster.
]]>We've already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin' and a-shakin' in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol' Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well - as do a host of other games from 2017's great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you're so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I'd have gone for in each category.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>We've hit the mid-point of the week and the see-saw of time is about to tip forward and hurtle us towards the weekend at an alarming rate. Perhaps more ominously, we will also be hurtling towards the litany of PC gaming Black Friday deals that are headed our way in a fortnight's time.
Before then, however, the deals aren't slowing down one bit and there's another big batch of digital deals to check out right here, right now. Everything from this week's release of Nioh to Cities Skylines and even the absolute gem that is Jagged Alliance 2 is represented across a variety of sites, so consider this a convenient mid-week digital deals roundup if you like. Let's get to it, shall we?
]]>Cities: Skylines has always had an environmental bent - one of the first things you can build is a wind turbine - but with the Green Cities expansion, cleaning up polluted cities has become a major focus. There’s a slew of new buildings and policies that make it a little bit easier to keep your citizens from living under an oppressive layer of smog.
How easy, though? I’ve started up a new city to find out. My goal: a completely pollution-free utopia where everyone is happy and healthy. This is probably the nicest thing I’ve done in Skylines; certainly it’s nicer than the time I tried to flood my entire city in poo, or the time I turned off the heating to see how long it would take for everyone to freeze to death.
]]>Modern cities are okay but for those who'd rather dream a little utopian, Cities: Skylines today launched its Green Cities expansion. Like other Skylines expansions, Green Cities doesn't massively expand game systems but does bring some eco-friendly new buildings to erect -- blocks clad in vertical planting, solar updraft towers, organic food shops, that sort of thing -- which have a few thematic new functions. They do look very nice. A free update has launched alongside the expansion too, with new content from electric cars to extra types of park.
Oh, and if you're not Skylining yet, the game is on sale right now too.
]]>Green Cities might look like urban paradise, but beneath the lush vertical gardens, something sinister is percolating. Sure, the draped greenery clinging to the side of the new high density apartment blocks looks attractive, but it's also reminiscent of post-human imagery; nature reclaiming the land. Zoom out far enough, so that the little cars and people are less apparent, and it’s not a great leap from green city to Twelve Monkeys, I Am Legend and The Last Of Us.
But forget the future for a moment because the now of Cities: Skylines [official site] upcoming expansion isn't the paradise it initially seems to be. Your attempts to create an environmentally friendly utopia might end with the construction of a new Silicon Valley. The road to hell is paved with reclaimed wood and good intentions.
]]>If the recent launch of the Concerts "mini-expansion" for Cities: Skylines [official site] made you wish the city-builder would get something more substantial, good news! Paradox today announced the Green Cities expansion for release later this year. As you might expect, it will let you turn your cities all hippy-dippy with everything from organic shops to plant-clad buildings. It bungs in a load of new assets for these and more, which should be nice for making cities more varied. Have a peek in the trailer:
]]>How difficult can organising a music festival be? Oh, right. Well! If you've got the moxie despite being woefully underqualified, you can now step up and organise concerts with the latest "mini-expansion" for city-builder Cities: Skylines [official site]. It lets players build festival grounds, host bands, and hopefully not end up with a musical mega-hell. It's not a deep business simulation but might be a bit of fun to brighten up your city.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] is a game in which every single citizen has a name, home and (if you're playing it reasonably effectively) job, but nobody matters in the slightest. For a game with such a chummy, chipper tone, it's weirdly cold. Dozens of people might leave town in protest at your mayoral ineptitude, or tens of thousands of people might die in a freak sewage accident, and not only does the game not care, it doesn't even try to make you care either.
There are eight million stories in the reasonably well-developed city, but if I want a human connection to any of them, I have to build it myself.
]]>I've done a lot of terrible things in my two year quest to ruin as many lives as possible in Cities: Skylines [official site]. I’ve allowed the dead to fester in their homes, I’ve turned off heating and electricity in the dead of winter, and once, I made an entire city drink its own poo. But with the launch of the Mass Transit expansion, I’m turning over a new leaf. Instead of making things worse, I’m going to fix my city’s awful congestion problems and be hailed a hero of the people.
At least that's the plan.
]]>A new expansion for Cities: Skylines [official site], named Mass Transit, has arrived to expand the city-building manage 'em up's public transport. The expansion adds ferries, monorails, cable cars, and -- for those building modernist cities of tomorrow -- blimps, along with new transport-y challenges, new policies, new road types, and new canal bits. Aw, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville expansion.
]]>I don't really 'get' driving cars in cities. Having always lived places where I can get everywhere I need by foot, bus, train, or bike, I am bamboozled by city-building games nudging me to build intersections resembling Celtic knots. I'm relieved that Cities: Skylines [official site] will focus on public transport in its next expansion, Mass Transit, which publishers Paradox have announced will launch on May 18th. Mass Transit will bring new forms of public transport, from ferries to whimsically utopian blimps, along with new transit hubs to ease interchanges. Here, have a look at all this in a new trailer:
]]>As long-time readers will know, I don't believe there's any possibility of a party unless someone brings a strategy game to the dancefloor. This year, EGX Rezzed is going to be party central. For the first time, Paradox will have a presence at the show, in the form of three playable games (including the just-announced Steel Division: Normandy 44's multiplayer) and two developer sessions. They're both on the Friday, with Cities: Skylines up first at 12PM and Stellaris following at 2PM. In the former, you'll hear Colossal Order's CEO on continuous development post-release, and working with a large community, and in the latter Stellaris' game director will talk about the first year post-release, and the major expansion, Utopia.
]]>Blimps. They’re big, they’re full of hot air, they’re historically prone to crashing to earth in an unstoppable blaze. If you like blimps then we have good news for you. The physical manifestation humankind’s hubris can soon be added to your bustling metropolis in Cities: Skylines [official site] as part of the Mass Transit DLC pack, which is also adding ferries, monorails and cable cars. This is so that your commuters can get to work more efficiently. I don’t know what right-thinking member of the public would get the 7am zeppelin every morning, but the mayors of Cities: Skylines have never been ones to indulge sensible policies.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Cities: Skylines [official site].
Cities: Skylines is a game about building roads. Its lovely set of road-building tools allow you to scribe beautiful curved boulevards into the gentle slopes and combes of virgin lands, and it has inspired 19-page forum topics entitled Show Us Your Interchanges and Steam Workshop lists 24,482 interchange designs.
Oh, and an incidental byproduct of a good road system is the growth of a city around it.
]]>I'm impressed they waited this long. Using earthquakes and hurricanes to play skyscraper dominoes has long been the alpha and the omega feature of citybuilder games (if you didn't trash the suburbs with an alien invasion, you weren't playing Sim City 2000 right). It's taken Cities: Skylines [official site] 19 months to do the entirely obvious thing, and I'm glad to say it's done it in style. Its new natural disasters are absolutely terrifying.
]]>Aside from starting a new tradition of unusually-named Steam Awards, Valve have also pulled out their worn and adored bargain bucket and have begun to fill it with games you’ll enthusiastically buy and probably never play. Yes, it's their Autumn Sale. In the streets, the apocalyptic jockeying for TVs and blenders has started. The moon has turned blood red. And I looked and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Black Friday, and sales followed with him.
]]>If you, like me, kneel at your bedside to whisper the prayer "Lord Godzilla, rise from your slumber and scour humanity from the Earth with your purifying nuclear fire", you may be comforted by apocalyptic visions in the upcoming Cities: Skylines [official site] expansion. Natural Disasters won't bring rampaging monsters to the spunky build 'em up (as far as I know) but it will rain meteors, wash sins away with tsunami, and all that good stuff. The wait is almost over, as publishers Paradox have announced Natural Disasters will launch on November 29th. They've shown it off in a new trailer too.
]]>Several cities in the popular construction sim Cities: Skylines [official site] have been destroyed or heavily damaged by a freak series of natural disasters. A tornado, earthquake, forest fire, meteor impact and flood all occurred within seconds of each other and devastated a number of metropolises, killing thousands of tiny people who do not really exist. Footage of the deadly phenomenon was captured by the developers of the game, who are thrilled with the result. Warning: the following video footage contains images some viewers may find mildly interesting.
]]>There are tons of ways to modify your Cities: Skylines [official site] experience. With official DLC packs that incorporate anything from bustling nightlife to horrific apocalyptic scenarios, and a bustling modding community, the custom city-building experience you've dreamed of is right at your fingertips.
Paradox Interactive this week launched a new content pack to honor its talented player content creators. The first Cities: Skylines Content Creator Pack is titled Art Deco, and features the work of Matt 'Shroomblaze' Crux.
]]>Building and running a safe and efficient city can be fun, sure. Cities: Skylines [official site] is already great for that. You know what's also fun? Smashing things. Cities: Skylines is now trying harder with that. Publishers Paradox today announced a new expansion for Colossal Order's city-builder, named Natural Disasters. Oh yes!
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I was certain I was done with city building sims. In fact, I think I thought I was done with sims. Gone was the magic of the classic Sim City 2000, the perfect balance of cartoony mayhem and rude interruptions of graphs. It felt like play, not work, even connecting up the water pipes. The genre disappeared down a hole I wasn't interested in descending, a terrifying underground world where graphs ruled. And then along came Cities: Skylines, and I was proven wrong.
]]>We're coming to the end of the Summer Steam Sale so chances are you've picked up the things you'd already got your eye on, but there are always games that sneak under the radar or come from genres you might usually ignore. That's why we've put together our final recommendation list. Here's a whole list of things we love and why we think they're worth your time! (Don't forget to check out our earlier picks and the comments, though - I picked up a bunch of games that had escaped my own notice through reader enthusiasm...)
]]>With Euro 2016 'kicking off' [a technical footballing term meaning 'throwing a wobbler' -ballkicking ed.] tomorrow, Cities: Skylines [official site] has brought football home with a little free DLC. The 'Match Day' DLC lets players build a stadium in their city, pick kit colours for their home team, earn a cut of ticket sales, enact stadium-related policies, and - oh god help - try to deal with the increased traffic of match day.
This is accompanied by a new update which gives the city-building game's pre-order bonus DLC bits to all players. Hello, bouncy castles and botanical gardens!
]]>Okay, so in a situation which rapidly escalated I started off admiring someone's recreation of Seattle in Cities: Skylines, ended up browsing some of the Steam Workshop mods and assets and am now trying to build a clown retirement community complete with clown cemetery.
Here is the awesome Seattle thing:
]]>I have been inside a sauna and I believe the health benefits are dubious at best. Snowfall, the latest expansion for Cities: Skylines [official site], disagrees with me. It reckons that saunas are both recreational and restorative, a mix of a clinic and a park. Build one and your citizens will send a flood of smiles bursting out of your city like souls ascending to heaven. I don’t understand why this is. When I sat in a sauna EVERYTHING WAS HOT and the AIR ITSELF WAS HOT and don’t even get me started on the door or the floor or what it was like to even move an inch.
However, this concludes the design disagreements that I have with Snowfall, which I think is a rather lovely and charming addition to Skylines. Let me explain why.
]]>I do like 'the Paradox approach' to expansions, where the paid additions are accompanied by big free updates with new things for all players. So sure, city-building sim Cities: Skylines [official site] will be playing with snow and trams in the Snowfall expansion next Thursday, but developers Colossal Order are also working on new things for everyone. I do like the look of the 'Theme Editor' letting folks retheme the world to look like, say, another planet. Or covering it in Dolph Lundgren. Have a look:
]]>I haven't played it in a few months, but I think about Cities: Skylines [official site] every other day. I'm full of unresolved intent: to build new kinds of cities, dig further into the last expansion, to go hunting for new mods on the Steam Workshop. Perhaps the next expansion, Snowfall, will be when I make these goals a reality. We now know it's due for release on February 18th.
]]>SNOW! SNOW! Come to the window! Sno... Wait, that's not real. That's a YouTube trailer for the second Cities: Skylines expansion, Snowfall [official site].
What this one does is add SNOW! and associated cold weather issues as challenge conditions for players to deal with. That'll be things like ensuring adequate heating so keeping up with increased electricity demand or adding water-based heat systems and keeping the roads open.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] paved its way into our hearts by being a good citybuilder, but much of its appeal lay in the game succeeding where the prior SimCity had failed. Mainly: by giving us space. Space to build roads and buildings without pressing against the almost immediate issue of tiny landmasses. Which makes it all the more exciting that the most recent patch has just increased building limits by another 50%.
]]>After Dark is the first expansion for Colossal Order and Paradox's well-received citybuilder Cities: Skylines [official site], and is focused on tourism, leisure and neon-lit night skies. It's out today, and here's what I made of it.
What could have been a goodwill-killer has turned into yet another poke in the eye for EA's approach to ill-fated SimCity. Cities: Skylines had flung the doors open to modding from day one, and by now it's unbelievably simple to render the entire game essentially unrecognisable, and massively improved, with a just a few clicks. With all this free stuff raining down, what possible point would there be in a paid add-on?
]]>Somehow I ended up thinking Cities: Skylines - After Dark [official site] would be a scuzzy, sleazy, neon affair. I was expecting a rain-soaked trailer with buzzing lights advertising GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS or CHAPS CHAPS CHAPS or something and soundtracked by Electric 6. Maybe Devil Nights off Senor Smoke.
It isn't. There are streetlights and windowlit office blocks and the soundtrack is perky and plinky plonky as it showcases the expansion's new nightspots:
]]>Based on my experiences with Hollyoaks Later, Baywatch Nights, and Late Night Woman's Hour, I expect the Cities: Skylines [official site] expansion 'After Dark' to focus on drug addiction, werewolves, and online dating. According to both Adam's preview and a press release before me announcing a release date, that is untrue. But do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
Come September 24th, we can investigate for ourselves whether it does really add day and night cycles, night life, taxis, and other after-dark odds and ends - or picking up drugged-out werewolves on Tinder.
]]>Delving into the glamour, glitz and grime of nightlife, Cities: Skylines' first expansion, After Dark, introduces revamped crime mechanics, specialised commercial areas, beachfront entertainment and a day/night cycle. We've been looking at the expansion in the company of developers Colossal Order.
]]>What are the best Steam Summer Sale deals? Each day for the duration of the sale, we'll be offering our picks - based on price, what we like, and what we think more people should play. Read on for the five best deals from day 3 of the sale.
]]>Hi folks!
Here's what happened in May in the RPS community.
In this alliterative edition: Blood Bowl [official site] brethren batter and bludgeon in preparation for the new game; Cities: Skylines [official site] succession games subsequently succeed; Dirt Rally [official site] roadsters rack-up a riveting league; Guild Wars 2 [official site] troopers take to hammering out their differences; and PlanetSide 2 [official site] players participate profoundly in another smashing of servers.
]]>Sorry for the delay on concluding this - one person got behind, then we had a domino effect where everyone else was off-schedule, then we got distracted by a bumblebee and... Here it is, though: the final part of the Cities: Skyline succession game I've been playing with Jonathan Shipley and Dan Corns, in which we pass our savefile onto the next person whenever our shared city levels up. In this last part: so much death, and yet not enough.
]]>Soon, you'll be able to add tunnels to your urban creations in Cities: Skylines [official site]. Even before the game had been released, Colossal Order had told me that tunnels were the one big feature they had been hoping to include at launch. I think the eventual outcome was the best possible scenario - the game was lovely at launch, mods instantly started to make it even lovelier, and now the tunnels are arriving in the form of a free update later this week.
]]>Republishing this feature from last month as it's now updated with part 2 - utility mods for a more efficient, easier, less chaotic city with more comprehensible traffic.
]]>Hi folks!
I'm Scott and I help moderate the RPS community forum. There's some great discussions going on over there but what I'm really interested in is what the members of the community do together - whether that's in games or out of them. Every month I'm going to provide a summary of what RPSers have been up to and how you can get involved.
This month: Cities: Skylines [official site] succession games; our Guild Wars 2 [official site] guild get more involved in PvP; the PlanetSide 2 [official site] outfits do battle in a server smash; and how to join the capers of our Grand Theft Auto V [official site] crew.
]]>When I wrote about the CityCopter mod for Cities: Skylines earlier this month, it was just a video of a prototype which hoped to introduce a little SimCopter to the now reigning city builder champ. In the comments on the post, reader Beanbee wrote, "Way to miss a trick mod. Why on earth is Ride of the Valkyries not playing with random emergency scanner background laced in?"
Well, Mr. Beanbee, the mod is available to download and play now, and the launch trailer below meets half your request.
]]>Welcome to the second instalment of my attempt to recreate an arcology in Cities: Skylines. As those of you who read the first part will know, I'm not talking about the bubble-topped utopia palaces of SimCity 2000 - I'm talking about a real arcology in the real world. Like Masdar City.
Masdar City is a sustainable, self-contained settlement under construction in the desert south-west of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It was originally supposed to have been completed by 2014, but the global financial crisis has meant that right now it just consists of a handful of office blocks. I've recreated the detailed plans for the city in Cities: Skylines, and I'm about to see if anyone actually wants to live in the paradise that I've created.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] is our RPS Game Of The Month for April. As part of our month of coverage, we asked Duncan Geere to build an arcology in the game. This is his attempt.
Arcologies are pretty awesome, as town planning concepts go. The towering, fishbowl-topped edifices that seasoned gamers will recognise from SimCity 2000 were one of that game's most beloved features, but they bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing. In reality (and I use that word loosely because no-one's ever successfully finished one) an arcology is merely a sustainable, self-contained settlement that can supply most of the needs of a large population that dwells within.
Cities: Skylines doesn't include the arcologies of SimCity 2000, and at the time of writing there's only one in the Steam workshop. So I thought it might be a fun experiment to try and build one myself - one a little closer to the true meaning of the term. I wanted to build a city that relies as little as possible on the outside world, with minimal impact on natural resources. As many planners in the real world have discovered, that is far harder than it appears.
]]>An experiment with colour mods in Cities: Skylines...
Long ago there were no colours in the world at all. Almost everything was grey, and what was not grey was black or white. It was a time that was called The Great Greyness.
Every morning a Wizard who lived during the time of The Great Greyness would open his window to look out at the wide land.
“Something is very wrong with the world,” he would say.
“It is hard to tell when the rainy days stop and the sunny days begin.” - Arnold Lobel
]]>I know what I said about big numbers. "Please be careful with numbers, chums," I said. "Many folks sadly seem to deploy statistics as weapons in territorial arguments," I said. Let's not do that. Numbers can be celebratory too, numbers can make you feel included, let you know that there are plenty of others like you out there.
If you bought Cities: Skylines, hey, you might like to know that you're not alone. Over one million copies of the city-building sim (our Game of the Month) have been sold, publishers Paradox announced today. Perhaps you all might like to meet up for drinks, a meal, and see where the night takes you? Finding a bar with space might be tricky though.
]]>The penultimate part of a series in which three players take it in turns to manage and build up one Cities: Skylines settlement, passing the savefile onto the next person whenever the city levels up. Joining me in this endeavour are Jonathan Shipley and Dan Corns.
This time: roads, garbage truck gridlock, smell refutation and New New Dansville.
]]>Continuing a series in which players take it in turns to manage and build up one Cities: Skylines settlement, passing the savefile onto the next person whenever the city levels up. Joining me in this endeavour are Jonathan Shipley and Dan Corns.
When last we left you, we foretold an apocalypse. Here's how The Brown Plague took 1,600 lives and very nearly killed the entire city.
]]>Cities: Skylines is great and all, but I must confess to being hamstrung by my imagination, or lack thereof. Once I've unlocked everything there is to build, I kind of run out of steam, because I don't have a designer's mind and complicated road systems scare me. But a friend, also playing the game and experiencing similar handicaps, had an idea: a succession game in which three of us take turns to co-operate on one city, passing on the savefile to the next person every time the city levelled up, and hoping something beautiful rather than catastrophic would emerge.
Given we've managed to suffer two major disasters (and bear in mind that this is not a game which usually invites much disaster) within the game's earliest stages, so far I'm leaning towards catastrophic.
]]>Every day I look at the Steam Workshop and subreddit for Cities Skylines [official site] and every day there is something I want to show to people. Look at this pretty braided highway! Look at this fancy circular city! And the mods. I'm not sure I've ever seen a mod community explode like this for a game that didn't already have an existing community.
Today's thing I need to share: a video of CityCopter, a helicopter mod in the vein of Maxis' old SimCopter.
]]>In an attempt to learn everything there is to know about our Game of the Month, Cities: Skylines [official site], I spoke to Colossal Order's CEO Mariina Hallikainen until we both ran out of words. We talked about the game's extraordinary success and what it means for the future of the 13-person company, the importance of mods, the fate of Cities in Motion, and the influence of dear departed Maxis. Along the way, there are discussions about simulations as educational tools, Colossal Order's next project, and the importance of a good working environment and the avoidance of crunch.
Most important of all? The origin story of Chirper.
]]>A floating speech bubble appears over Videogame City, signalling that the citizens are demanding something. Clicking on it reveals the source of problem: "Not enough good city builders." It seems all that have been built so far are poorly connected to the (road) network, too small to cater to the growing population, and otherwise stocked too poorly with what people want.
Best construct Cities: Skylines [official site]. It has huge cities, mod support and works offline, but is it doing more than simply filling a hole created by its peers? John, Alec, Adam, Pip and Graham gathered to discuss why it's the RPS' Game of the Month for April.
]]>Did you know? Seven million games were released yesterday. Such a constant deluge can make it difficult to keep up with what's happening right now in the world of PC games, and while RPS exists to tell you the four million games you must be playing on any given day, it's possible you have even less time. What if you need to pick just one game to play?
That's what Game Of The Month is for. On the first Monday of each month, we'll pick one released game to highlight for the rest of that month. It's us saying: if you should be paying attention to one thing right now, this is it. We'll then write about that game more throughout the rest of the month, explaining why we love it in a group verdict, interviewing the developers for insight about its creation and future, writing fun diaries that show you what it's like to play, and more.
First up, Cities: Skylines [official site].
]]>There's already been a Cities: Skylines [official site] mod that lets you wander your streets from a low, 'first-person' style camera, but what about doing it with a friend? Reddit user 'Fr0sZ' posted a video today of his work-in-progress Cities Skylines multiplayer mod, in which each player is represented in the world as a pedestrian avatar and able to walk around. See below.
]]>A bird's eye view of a city is ideal for budding urban planners, but deep down I suspect many of us want to explore our creations first-hand. Thanks to one of the many Cities: Skylines [official site] modders, you can do just that with the first-person camera mod.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] has sold 250,000 copies in the 24 hours since launch, including preorders as day one sales. That's more than any other Paradox game in the same period - Europa Universalis IV surpassed 300,000 sales around six months after release - and around a quarter of SimCity 2013's first fortnight of sales.
Paradox are understandably pleased by the reception but they're already looking to the future of the game. When I played it before release, Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen told me that the team already had free content lined up - features that weren't quite ready for release, including tunnels. Support should continue for years though, as with Paradox's grand strategy mainstays, and will come in the form of paid expansions and free patch updates.
]]>Cities: Skylines [official site] feels like the response to a question. That question is “what, exactly, do people want?” By contrast, 2013's SimCity felt like the response to an order: “make them do this.” I don’t wish to get caught up in criticising the controversial EA city-builder, especially in light of the all-but-closure of its longstanding developer Maxis this week, but the ethos of these two games is so very different, even though they’re both in theory offering the same scenario: design a city from the ground up, keep it running, make it richer, make it grander.
]]>Buildings, yeah? Like large, emotionally neutral tanks. Cities: Skylines [official site] is the hot kid on the block currently, with release just a few days away on March 10th. Thus devs Colossal Order/publishers Paradox have released the final dev diary, showing off some of the more original systems the game has. It also features the most adorable bit of music I've ever heard. You have been warned.
]]>Yesterday I did my first-ever game stream (well, I did try with Thief a couple of years back, but I basically didn't commentate), with Cities: Skylines. How did it go? Well, let me tell you about it via the medium of talking nervously to a webcam, as well as giving you another chance to watch my fumbled attempts to get to grips with Paradox's anticipated city-builder.
]]>OH GOD. Why am I doing this? Well, partly because it's high time I learned how, and partly because we're allowed to stream Cities Skylines before we're allowed to write reviews. Thus, in a few minutes I shall leave my comfort zone to bring you live footage of me playing (trying to play) Paradox's new city-builder. It's due to go live at 3.45pm UK time, but you'll be able to watch the whole thing retroactively later if you prefer.
]]>I suppose we do post about Cities: Skylines [official site] a fair bit, but that's partly because it's a big chunk of (current) future hopes for a whole genre. Me, I'm well catered-for as I mostly play games in thriving genres like 'shooting men's faces' and 'dreamy wandering around surreal landscapes'. But with Cities XXL a wash, a minor update spun off into a so-called sequel, what else is coming soon for people who dream of building grand cities? So here, have a trailer going over Skylines' mod support, which'll let you make things to build.
]]>With release less than a month away, Cities: Skylines [official site] could well be creaking under the weight of expectations. 2013's SimCity left citybuilding fans hungry. Cities XXL didn't satisfy the pangs, leaving Skylines in the unenviable position of having a ravenous audience in waiting, the majority of whom have already sent a couple of lackluster meals back to the kitchen.
It could be worse, of course. Everyone could have eaten the first dish that was set in front of them and headed for home. Skylines has a captive audience and at the ParadoxCon last week, I had my first chance to take a close look at what it'll be serving up for them. I played for over an hour, long enough to purchase two extra plots of land and fill them with great looping roads, beachfront residential properties and a couple of graveyards. The signs are very good indeed.
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