Cities: Skylines Standard 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 Standard Edition is the base game with every free update. None of the expansions are included. Keys activate on Steam; the console versions are not sold as codes.