I’m not sure if Valve’s latest promotional wotsit on Steam knows whether it’s coming or going. On one hand, it’s nice that the Spring Cleaning Event (running until Monday, 28th May) is nudging players into trying out games they may have bought in sales and never touched, but pairing that with nine simultaneous free weekend events does somewhat undermine the message.

Ah well, it’s an excuse to play videogames all weekend. Can’t grumble about that. Plus, there’s an actual free game giveaway running – take a peek within. Oh, and yesterday’s big Steam giveaway is still live until tomorrow, so try that too. Oh dear, there’s just too many games.

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Now that summer is near, Cities: Skylines developers Colossal Order are taking a break from disasters and management to kick back with the Parklife expansion. Released today, it lets builders fancy up their cities with amusement parks, nature reserves, zoos, sightseeing bus tours, and other sources of summertime fun.

As with all the Paradox expansions, so many Paradox expansions, this goes hand-in-hand with a free update adding new features for all players. Expect new props for parks, new models for tourists, and loads of tweaks and fixes. (more…)

It feels rare for a week to go by where Paradox don’t announce another expansion for their growing stable of strategy and simulation sandboxes, but it’s also hard to complain when they look as nice as Parklife, the next expansion for Cities: Skylines. Adding yet another direction for your perfect city to grow in, Parklife – unsurprisingly – spans parks of all kinds, from national forests full of hiking trails right up to cash-guzzling corporate theme parks, and it’s due out next month.

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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.

That s quite a lot of stuff to get through. And you should absolutely give Steam Workshop a browse — you never know what you might find. If you don t want to faff, however, I ve gathered a bunch of the best, including some personal favourites that I can t live without. Most of these mods will work with the base game, but there are a few you ll need one of the expansions for, and remember to check for conflicts.

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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. (more…)

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 wanted to drill a little deeper than that – so nothing that generally requires a competitive streak. I’m chasing a certain feel rather than a certain category. Flying, walking, puzzling, driving, building, dreaming, climbing, stretching, swinging (not like that), swimming, wondering: these are just a few of the ways in which flashing pixels can make you feel a very different sort of accomplishment.

And, of course, these are not even slightly the be-all and end-all of non-violent games on PC – please do nominate more in comments below. (more…)

We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

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 roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.

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We’ve hit the mid-point of the week and the see-saw of time is about to tip forward and hurtle us towards the weekend at an alarming rate. Perhaps more ominously, we will also be hurtling towards the litany of PC gaming Black Friday deals that are headed our way in a fortnight’s time.

Before then, however, the deals aren’t slowing down one bit and there’s another big batch of digital deals to check out right here, right now. Everything from this week’s release of Nioh to Cities Skylines and even the absolute gem that is Jagged Alliance 2 is represented across a variety of sites, so consider this a convenient mid-week digital deals roundup if you like. Let’s get to it, shall we?

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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 easy, though? I ve started up a new city to find out. My goal: a completely pollution-free utopia where everyone is happy and healthy. This is probably the nicest thing I ve done in Skylines; certainly it s nicer than the time I tried to flood my entire city in poo, or the time I turned off the heating to see how long it would take for everyone to freeze to death.

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