Cities: Skylines Deluxe Edition

Cities: Skylines is the city builder that took over from SimCity when SimCity stopped being one. You zone residential, commercial, industrial and office land, then spend most of your time on the thing that actually decides whether a city works: moving people through it. Roads, rail, buses, metro, ferries and aircraft all have to connect, and a badly placed junction will back traffic up for an in-game decade. The simulation tracks citizens individually — where they live, work and study, how they commute, when they get sick — so problems surface as specific complaints rather than an abstract happiness number. Budgets, tax rates, police, fire, healthcare, education, water and waste are all yours to balance, and districts can be given their own policies. A map starts as a 2x2 kilometre tile and can grow to 10x10. There is no multiplayer; it is single-player, with a sandbox mode and unusually deep Steam Workshop support for maps, assets and mods. The Deluxe Edition adds the fourteen-track soundtrack, a digital art book and five landmark monuments — the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Brandenburg Gate, the Arc de Triomphe and Grand Central Terminal. It does not include the After Dark expansion.