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Cities: Skylines' new Natural Disasters expansion is spectacularly horrifying
A beautiful end of the world
122 weeks ago
Feature: We built this city on conveniently delineated tiles
A lot of genres have had a resurgence over the past five years, but none more successfully than management games. There are now more ways to direct trains, lay conveyor belts, coral visitors and profit, profit, profit than you could play in a lifetime. The question is: which of these famous timesinks is worth your time, and which of the whipsmart new hires can compete…
9 months ago
Feature: Irredeemable
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!
Feature: Low-pressure area
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…
1 year ago
Feature: Mod it and they will come
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.…
Feature: Give PC a chance
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…
2 years ago
Feature: The biggest hits of the past 12 months
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…
Feature: Gonna take pollution down to zero
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…
Feature: Take parking lots, put up a paradise
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…
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…
Feature: Making home, not homes
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…
Feature: Blimp my city
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…
Feature: Where we're going, we'll need loads of roads
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…
Feature: Mod it and they will come.
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,…
3 years ago
Feature: Stimulating City
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…
Feature: The Final Picks
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…
4 years ago
Feature: 2015's best simulation game.
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!
Feature: SinCity
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.
Feature: Dawn of the third day.
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.
Feature: How To Get Involved
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…
Feature: How not to kill a city
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…
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