The latest free game being given away through the Epic Games Store is the excellent city builder Cities: Skylines. Celebrating the game’s 7th anniversary, you can get the game for free from today until 4PM UK time on 17th March.
Want to grab it? Just click this link;
Get Cities: Skylines for free from the Epic Games Store
The next Epic giveaway has also been revealed to be In Sound Mind – read our review of this psychological horror game here.
Marking the seventh anniversary, a new trailer highlights that players have played for a cumulative 1,027,439 years of game time, with people founding 130,951,111 cities in that time. There have also been 1738 mods and 233,717 assets made, highlighting the strength of the game’s community.
Cities: Skylines has remained the preeminent city builder ever since its launch in 2015. At the time of its original launch, the genre was in a real funk with SimCity’s 2012 reboot going in a direction that fans were not particularly fond of, and Cities XL the only other game to potentially scratch that same itch.
With a space to fill, Cities: Skylines was an immediate success, enjoying a good critical reception and becoming one of Paradox Interactive’s fastest selling games. It raced past 1 million sales in its first month, and more than 6 million in its first four years. In that time, the game was also adapted to Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and even Nintendo Switch.
From day one, the game nailed the core fundamentals of the city builder – I wrote in our review, “Cities: Skylines might be Colossal Order’s first attempt at a city builder, but it already feels well rounded and complete.” The game has been supported through countless updates and regular expansions that flesh out different areas of the game. This started off with night time in the After Dark expansion, winter weather in Snowfall, and disasters with Natural Disasters, and on and on.
The pace has slowed significantly over the last few years, but the Airports expansion arrived in January 2022 to give players the ability to build and fully customise airports for their city. Perhaps Colossal Order are working on a new project?
