Cities: Skylines

Base-building is de rigueur these days, what with all those survival games, Minecraft, Fallout 4 and now Fortnite, but before all that we had tiny top-down or isometric worlds in which we diligently built cities and dungeons and theme parks and rail networks. The central appeal of management games was and is that they give us an idealised sense of what it is like to…

Tagged with Anno 1404, best games, best management games, bestest games, Championship Manager: Season 01/02, Dawn of Discovery, feature, management games, Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Rollercoaster Tycoon, RPS Recommended, rps-ultromegafeature, The Settlers II, Transport Tycoon, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Zeus + Poseidon, Zeus: Master Of Olympus, Banished, Cities: Skylines, Dungeon Keeper, Dwarf Fortress, Evil Genius, Factorio, Frostpunk, Planet Coaster, Prison Architect, RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Startopia, Surviving Mars, The Sims 2, Tropico 5.

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.…

Tagged with best mods, Colossal Order, feature, mods, Paradox, Cities: Skylines.

My nerves have been sufficiently jangled and my trigger-finger sufficiently itched by the glut of action games which landed in the closing months of last year. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to 2018, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat. Primarily we're talking violence-free games here, but I…

Tagged with Bernband, best games, feature, Floating Point, Moutain, osmos, World of Goo, Abzu, American Truck Simulator, Cities: Skylines, Desert Golfing, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Getting Over It, Gorogoa, Grow Home, Hexcells, Kentucky Route Zero, Mini Metro, Planet Coaster, Proteus, Rime, Slime Rancher, Superflight.

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…

Tagged with Age of Empires II HD, Call of Duty®: Black Ops II, Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, feature, Final Fantasy XIV Online, Left 4 Dead 2, NBA 2K17, NBA 2K18, Shadowverse CCG, Steam, The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited, The Sims™ 3, 7 Days To Die, Ark: Survival Evolved, Arma 3, Assassin's Creed Origins, Astroneer, Black Desert Online, Borderlands 2, Call of Duty: WW2, charts, Cities: Skylines, Conan Exiles, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Crusader Kings II, Cuphead, Dark Souls III, Darkest Dungeon, Dead by Daylight, Dishonored 2, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Don't Starve Together, Doom, Dota 2, Dying Light, Elite Dangerous, Endless Space 2, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Europa Universalis IV, Factorio, Fallout 4, Farming Simulator 17, Football Manager 2017, Football Manager 2018, For Honor, Friday the 13th: The Game, Garry's Mod, Grand Theft Auto V, Grim Dawn, H1Z1, Hearts of Iron IV, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Hitman, Hollow Knight, Just Cause 3, Killing Floor 2, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, NieR: Automata, Northgard, Oxygen Not Included, Paladins, Path of Exile, Payday 2, Planet Coaster, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Prey, Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, RimWorld, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, Rocket League, Rust, Sid Meier's Civilization V, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Smite, Sniper Elite 4, South Park: The Fractured but Whole, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Subnautica, Tales of Berseria, Team Fortress 2, Tekken 7, Terraria, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, The Elder Scrolls Online, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Forest, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, theHunter: Call of the Wild, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Tom Clancy's The Division, Total War: Warhammer, Total War: Warhammer II, Wallpaper Engine, War Thunder, Warframe, Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War III, Watch Dogs 2, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, XCOM 2.

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…

Tagged with Cities: Skylines - Green Cities, Colossal Order, feature, Paradox Interactive, Cities: Skylines.

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…

Tagged with Cities: Skylines - Green Cities, Colossal Order, feature, Gamescom 2017, Paradox Interactive, preview, Cities: Skylines.

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…

Tagged with Colossal Order, feature, Paradox Interactive, The Joy Of, Cities: Skylines.

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…

Tagged with Colossal Order, feature, Paradox Interactive, Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines - Mass Transit.

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…

Tagged with Antti Lehto, Colossal Order, Damien Morello, design, feature, Karoliina Korppoo, roads, Simulation, The Mechanic, Cities: Skylines.

Cities: Skylines [official site] is one of those games that if given the chance will swallow you whole. Like any simulation game worth its salt, it's comprised of so many moving parts that only by digging deep into its systems, mechanics and quirks can you hope to scratch its veneer and begin to understand what makes it tick. It's a wonderful game once you do,…

Tagged with best mods, Colossal Order, feature, mods, Paradox, Cities: Skylines.

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…

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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…

Tagged with A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, feature, Steam, Steam Sale, Apotheon, Cities: Skylines, Cradle, Day Of The Tentacle Remastered, Door Kickers, Hexcells, Kentucky Route Zero, Legend of Grimrock, Legend of Grimrock 2, Mini Metro, Prison Architect, Risk of Rain, Shadow Warrior, Shadow Warrior 2, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

What is the best simulation game of 2015? The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games from throughout the year, and behind today's door is... Cities: Skylines!

Tagged with best games, Colossal Order, feature, Paradox Interactive, The RPS Advent Calendar 2015, The RPS Bestest Best Games, The RPS Bestest Best Games 2015, best pc games, Cities: Skylines.

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.

Tagged with Colossal Order, feature, first look, Paradox, Paradox Development Studio, preview, Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines After Dark.

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.

Tagged with feature, Lethal League, Steam Summer Sale 2015, Cities: Skylines, Prison Architect, Sunless Sea, The Evil Within.

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…

Tagged with Blood Bowl, feature, rps community, Cities: Skylines, Dirt Rally, Guild Wars 2, PlanetSide 2.

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…

Tagged with Diary, feature, skiary, Cities: Skylines.

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.…

Tagged with feature, rps community, Cities: Skylines, Grand Theft Auto V, Guild Wars 2, PlanetSide 2.

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…

Tagged with Arcologyology, Colossal Order, feature, Game Of The Month, Game Of The Month: April 2015, Paradox Interactive, Cities: Skylines.