Cities: Skylines - Snowfall released

The second expansion to the highly-successful city builder has arrived, bringing with it snowy tidings. Besides introducing new buildings and features, the expansion is released alongside a patch for all players that adds free content.

Cities: Skylines is one of the best things to happen to the city-builder genre in years. Since its launch a year ago the game has gone on to sell around two million copies and for good reason – it has a solid base mechanics and is utterly customizable. Users have gone bonkers in creating mods for the game and the Steam Workshop boasts several thousands mods that touch upon nearly every aspect of the game imaginable. In a sense, the developers have to compete with their own community when it comes to providing content. The previous expansion added a day/night cycle and several other features that most users were thrilled with so it was a tough act to follow.

Snowfall continues the trend of adding more variety in the gameplay by introducing the realities of winter into the mix. Services like snowplows have been introduced as well as ski slopes and curling rinks, giving the player more ways to keep their cities efficient and their citizens happy. Most importantly, the inclusion of saunas as a healthcare-type building confirms the developers’ very Finnish way of looking at the world. There’s a bunch more stuff in there but, personally, I'm excited about being able to manage heating for my cities; that the demands for heat and electricity are affected by the current temperature is a nerd dream come true.

Continuing the trend of adding new free features with every expansion, a sizable patch has been released for all users. Among the choicest changes are a better UI for public transportation, the inclusion of trams and other weather like rain and fog. There’s also a theme editor which allow players to create their own tilesets and mod the appearance of the game world as much as they wish.

I have to admit that I skipped the previous expansion and haven’t played Cities: Skylines in some time. But with all the changes and new stuff to play around with, it might be time to give the game another spin.

You can grab Cities: Skylines – Snowfall directly from the publisher, from Steam or this Games Republic store (where a portion of the money goes to help out GOL). All digital retailers ought to give out Steam keys. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.