With Euro 2016 ‘kicking off’ [a technical footballing term meaning ‘throwing a wobbler’ -ballkicking ed.]> tomorrow, Cities: Skylines [official site] has brought football home with a little free DLC. The ‘Match Day’ DLC lets players build a stadium in their city, pick kit colours for their home team, earn a cut of ticket sales, enact stadium-related policies, and – oh god help – try to deal with the increased traffic of match day.

This is accompanied by a new update which gives the city-building game’s pre-order bonus DLC bits to all players. Hello, bouncy castles and botanical gardens!

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Okay, so in a situation which rapidly escalated I started off admiring someone’s recreation of Seattle in Cities: Skylines, ended up browsing some of the Steam Workshop mods and assets and am now trying to build a clown retirement community complete with clown cemetery.

Here is the awesome Seattle thing:

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I have been inside a sauna and I believe the health benefits are dubious at best. Snowfall, the latest expansion for Cities: Skylines [official site], disagrees with me. It reckons that saunas are both recreational and restorative, a mix of a clinic and a park. Build one and your citizens will send a flood of smiles bursting out of your city like souls ascending to heaven. I don t understand why this is. When I sat in a sauna EVERYTHING WAS HOT and the AIR ITSELF WAS HOT and don t even get me started on the door or the floor or what it was like to even move an inch.

However, this concludes the design disagreements that I have with Snowfall, which I think is a rather lovely and charming addition to Skylines. Let me explain why.

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I do like ‘the Paradox approach’ to expansions, where the paid additions are accompanied by big free updates with new things for all players. So sure, city-building sim Cities: Skylines [official site] will be playing with snow and trams in the Snowfall expansion next Thursday, but developers Colossal Order are also working on new things for everyone. I do like the look of the ‘Theme Editor’ letting folks retheme the world to look like, say, another planet. Or covering it in Dolph Lundgren. Have a look:

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I haven’t played it in a few months, but I think about Cities: Skylines [official site] every other day. I’m full of unresolved intent: to build new kinds of cities, dig further into the last expansion, to go hunting for new mods on the Steam Workshop. Perhaps the next expansion, Snowfall, will be when I make these goals a reality. We now know it’s due for release on February 18th.

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SNOW! SNOW! Come to the window! Sno… Wait, that’s not real. That’s a YouTube trailer for the second Cities: Skylines expansion, Snowfall [official site].

What this one does is add SNOW! and associated cold weather issues as challenge conditions for players to deal with. That’ll be things like ensuring adequate heating so keeping up with increased electricity demand or adding water-based heat systems and keeping the roads open.

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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!

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Cities: Skylines [official site] paved its way into our hearts by being a good citybuilder, but much of its appeal lay in the game succeeding where the prior SimCity had failed. Mainly: by giving us space. Space to build roads and buildings without pressing against the almost immediate issue of tiny landmasses. Which makes it all the more exciting that the most recent patch has just increased building limits by another 50%.

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After Dark is the first expansion for Colossal Order and Paradox’s well-received citybuilder Cities: Skylines [official site], and is focused on tourism, leisure and neon-lit night skies. It’s out today, and here’s what I made of it.>

What could have been a goodwill-killer has turned into yet another poke in the eye for EA’s approach to ill-fated SimCity. Cities: Skylines had flung the doors open to modding from day one, and by now it’s unbelievably simple to render the entire game essentially unrecognisable, and massively improved, with a just a few clicks. With all this free stuff raining down, what possible point would there be in a paid add-on?

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Somehow I ended up thinking Cities: Skylines – After Dark [official site] would be a scuzzy, sleazy, neon affair. I was expecting a rain-soaked trailer with buzzing lights advertising GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS or CHAPS CHAPS CHAPS or something and soundtracked by Electric 6. Maybe Devil Nights off Senor Smoke.

It isn’t. There are streetlights and windowlit office blocks and the soundtrack is perky and plinky plonky as it showcases the expansion’s new nightspots:

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