Cities: Skylines

Cities: Skylines arrived just two years after the botched SimCity reboot and effectively became the game that saved the city-building genre. Finnish studio Colossal Order, which had experience from the smaller Cities in Motion series focused on transport, built the game on a principle that SimCity 2013 lacked: expansive maps without an artificial size limit, no forced online connection, and a deep traffic simulation that underpins most of the late-game challenges. The player founds and expands a city from scratch, dealing with zoning, public transport, power, and waste management, with traffic jams among the most common problems that force entire districts to be rebuilt.

A key factor in the game's success was its openness to modifications via Steam Workshop, through which the community created thousands of add-ons over the years, from new buildings to traffic tools to complete reworks of the simulation. Publisher Paradox Interactive also supported the game long-term with a series of expansions that added winter climate, disasters, bridges and harbors, or university campuses, so the base game gradually grew a number of optional layers.

It was precisely the combination of accessibility for newcomers and depth for advanced players that made it the most-played city-building strategy game of its generation for years, and it became the reference title against which most new games in the genre are now measured.

Why play it: An ideal choice for anyone who wants to build and manage a city without artificial restrictions and with the support of thousands of community modifications, whether a newcomer or a seasoned genre veteran.