Cities: Skylines Free On Epic

Monday, House of the Dead returned with a new trailer for the remake, and Activision-Blizzard was caught up in their own wrongful house of dead. Tuesday, Frontier made me very happy, and the new season of Halo came in like another stale fart. Wednesday, Blizzard unveiled they will continue to make what Blizzard has been making for years, one of the wizard games got a delay, but witch one? EA might be taking over WWE games in the future because there aren’t enough loot boxes. Thursday, the EVO lineup for 2022 was revealed, but it doesn’t have Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3, so who cares? Also, Valve did their yearly report.

Right on to this week’s free game on the Epic Games Store this week, and it will be a quick one because quite frankly if you don’t own Cities: Skylines by now you are a monster. It is the rebuke to EA’s always-online DRM, for which according to a report by PC Gamer might become stronger in general as a result of “world events.” Cities: Skylines is the only example I can think of that captures that SimsCity feelings. Don’t get me wrong, there is a heavy reliance on traffic, but I’d argue something like Surviving Mars has too heavy a focus on resource management.

Same with Tropico, there is a focus on something else that makes the town planning fantasy fall away for the sake of something else. Cities: Skylines doesn’t get too much in its own way, while also being simultaneously similar enough and distinct enough to break free from the defined mold. While it may not be the most well-rounded of the genre, SimsCity 3000 takes that, it is the only modern attempt that even remotely touches Will Wright’s long-running series of satirical games turned into the things they were a parody of.

All this week you can pick up Cities: Skylines on the Epic Games Store for free until the morning of the 17th of March. Moving on to next week’s game, In Sound Mind, I’m going to widdle all over that like a brand new puppy. It is always a great sign when the first trailer you see on Steam is some useless bints gormlessly looking at a screen on a camera, in a well-light room full of stringly blue lights, and screaming at mild horror. It is what is called YouTuber bait, then again, that could be misconstrued as a 13-year-old. A normal trailer would suffice, YouTubers mumbling before yelling at the bump under the dim streetlight is never going to sell your game when someone is actually playing it.