Cities: Skylines has had a fantastic run: 8 years of mods and DLC, inspiring an incalculable number of cities. But with the sequel coming, it's time for the greatest city builder around to finally rest. On May 23, it will receive its last expansion.
Hotels & Retreats is a mini-expansion that will, unsurprisingly, let you plonk down more tourist attractions and accommodation in an effort to get rich from holidaymakers. You'll start out with a wee hotel chain, just one star, but you'll eventually unlock more specialised and luxurious buildings. To give tourists more to do, you'll also be able to construct new parks, cafes, playgrounds and restaurants.
On top of that, you'll be able to build your tourism empire on five new maps: three European maps, one tropical map and one temperate map.
It's pretty low key for a final expansion, and to be honest I was hoping for something a bit more exotic or weird for this last hurrah. That said, with work on Cities: Skylines 2 well underway, it's not really all that surprising that Colossal Order didn't want to go too big. And, to be fair, the actual assets do look fantastic.
There's also a trio of content creator packs that add growable industrial buildings from different eras, Japanese railroad scenery, and growable buildings and props inspired by Brooklyn and Queens. Two new radio stations will also be available, together giving you two hours of piano music and '90s pop.
While Cities: Skylines 2 is coming this year, I suspect the original game will continue to be popular for a while. Not everyone is going to be ready to say goodbye to 8 years of mods, and it's going to take some time before the modders make the sequel their own.
It's leaving behind a heck of a legacy, too. When Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 there was a huge gap left by the failure of SimCity a couple of years prior. In this vacuum, Skylines secured its title as the best city builder around. But now we're in a very different era, where we can't move for all the city builders being flung at us. The sequel's going to have a lot more competition, but the reputation of its predecessor should certainly put it on good footing.
