Cities: Skylines erects free trial weekend

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.

Head on over to Steam and you can download the full version of Skylines and play it until Sunday at 9pm (that's 1pm Pacific). If you dig it, the game is on sale until 6pm on Monday too, with a 75% discount bringing it down to £5.74/€6.99/$7.49.

Its expansions and DLC packs are on sale as well. If you're interested in those, we have written about the Green Cities, Mass Transit, Natural Disasters, Snowfall, and After Dark expansions before.

But if you need a little nudge to get you playing it in the first place, here's Alec again:

"The core Skylines experience is instead calmly 'painting' districts, pipes and roads, the land a canvas for what most pleases your eye. There is time (and slow-time) aplenty to place the powerlines and water pumps required to make it all function – to build a city in Skylines is to gently lose yourself in an unhurried world."

It's a bit like doll houses but with fewer little chairs and casseroles that are so beautiful you want to cry, yeah?