Cities: Skylines

Paradox Interactive's in-depth city-builder is the latest PC game to receive the Humble Bundle treatment, with a new collection that corrals the base game and over ten DLC packs for under 15.

As usual, it's a tiered affair. If you want, you can just get the game by itself for a quid, which seems like a bit of a bargain to me. As for the DLC packs, these range from mini-expansions with themed items to new in-game radio stations.

Here's how all the tiers in the Cities: Skylines Humble Bundle breakdown:

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Saints Row IV: Re-Elected

Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt Rally 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - plus an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected (which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen heights. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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Saints Row IV: Re-Elected

Microsoft has revealed the latest titles heading to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service for PC, and they look an awful lot like Dirt 2.0, Saints Row 4, Cities: Skylines, and Bad North.

Cities: Skylines, of course, is developer Colossal Order's phenomenally popular city-builder, which, since its launch in 2015, has gone from strength to strength. Four years on, it's now received eight major expansions - After Dark, Snowfall, Natural Disasters, Mass Transit, Green Cities, Parklife, Industries, and Campus - an enormous number of free feature updates, and even a console release. Its enduring popularity is well-deserved too; it's a thoroughly entertaining urban planning and traffic management sim, and well-worth checking out.

As for developer Volition's Saints Row 4: Re-Elected which includes all DLC), it's a wonderfully idiotic spin on the open-world gangster genre, this time ramping up the ridiculousness to previously unseen degrees. While early games in the series played it mostly straight, Saints Row 4 throws caution to the wind, delivering a game in which aliens trap our likeable rogue's gallery of heroes in a digital simulation of their beloved city of Steelport.

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LIMBO

Subscription gaming services such as Xbox Game Pass, EA Access and PlayStation Now have become a good deal for players - or at least, a good way of ensuring you never reach the bottom of your pile of shame. As this year's E3 festivities made plain, they are now central to platform holder strategy, with Microsoft releasing all its first-party titles on Game Pass, and Google Stadia to ship with its own, currently rather meagre subscription game service. But are they always a fair deal for developers? The details of these partnerships remain closely guarded, but in a panel discussion at Gamelab last week hosted by GamesIndustry.biz editor-in-chief Matt Handrahan, some of the people behind Crusader Kings, Rime, Q.U.B.E. and Inside offered broad thoughts on Xbox Game Pass in particular.

"Consumers want as many games as possible, as free as possible, and you can't get anything for free, so you need to find the right price, but that's the angle," began Dino Patti, co-founder of Playdead and latterly, Somerville developer Jumpship. "Developers need to look at what does this get me, and for me, and I might be biased, but I think the way business is for Game Pass, it's the first time it's actually what I would consider fair for developers.

"[All the other times] I've been suggested subscription it's never worked out, because they don't know what developers need, and in the end, it is developers putting out a game for free!" Patti went on, adding, "with Game Pass they're doing it correctly for the developers."

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Cities: Skylines

Developer Colossal Order's perennially popular city builder Cities: Skylines is going back to school in its latest expansion, Campus, which comes to PC on 21st May.

Campus, as its name suggests, is all about university life, and helps budding city builders raise their metropolis' status through higher education. Come the expansion, it'll be possible to create an area of your city exclusively for learning, with new tools enabling players to designate campuses as either Trade School, Liberal Arts, or University.

By attracting new students to your burgeoning educational establishment, and by creating Academic Works, it's possible to increase its reputation and unlock new buildings. These include nine unique faculties and special varsity sports arenas - the latter covering football, basketball, baseball, track & field, and swimming, with players able to manage teams (customising kits, or hiring coaches and cheerleaders) and sell tickets to the sporting events, even collecting prizes when wins happen.

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Cities: Skylines

What's that you say? You don't have enough expansions for Cities: Skylines? Don't worry, here's another.

On October 23rd, Cities: Skylines will be receiving a new DLC expansion called Industries, which - you guessed it - allows players to take a more in-depth approach to how they manage industrial areas in their cities.

According to the press release, Industries' new features include specialised buildings and the ability to manage the production chain "from raw material extraction up to final end product". You can also "manage traffic and logistics with industry warehouses and the use of the new cargo services," such as a cargo airport.

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Cities: Skylines

EA has added another helping of non-EA games to its PC subscription service Origin Access, including popular construction sim Cities: Skylines and beautiful adventure puzzler Rime.

The well-received Darksiders: Warmastered Edition is also now included, as are indie games Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, Mad Games Tycoon, "action-explorer" Jotun, "chaotic side scroller" Ghost 1.0 and role-player Crashlands.

There's some delightful irony in Cities: Skylines now being part of EA's subscription offering - after the indie game bettered the publisher's own, much-maligned Sim City several years back.

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Hearts of Iron 2 Complete

Paradox is getting into the business of making board games via Kickstarter.

The Swedish publisher, known for its grand strategy video games on PC, is working on tabletop versions of four of its biggest titles: Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and Cities: Skylines.

The first game to be made is the Crusader Kings board game, which is designed and published with Free League Publishing (Mutant Year Zero and Tales from the Loop RPG). In the medieval-set game, players compete for military, religious and political power while keeping their personal dynasty strong using cards and miniatures.

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Cities: Skylines

Cities Skylines' next expansion, Parklife, will launch for PC and Mac on May 24th, publisher Paradox Interactive has announced, and will introduce customisable theme parks, zoos, nature reserves, and more.

Parklife's main focus is on providing the facilities to transform your city's boring, empty patches of land into bustling tourist attractions. To that end, it introduces the new park area tool, used to create park districts which can be fully customised with new buildings and props.

You'll be able to use paths to create specific routes for your visitors to travel, and then set ticket prices for walking and sightseeing tours, helping to enhance tourism.

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Cities: Skylines

Xbox Game Pass will add Cities: Skylines to its line-up next month.

The sandbox city sim is set to become part of the Xbox Games Pass catalogue on 11th April, alongside seven other games - all of which are indies.

It's good timing for Cities: Skylines, which recently added mods to its Xbox One edition designed by community members.

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