Feature: 4 Things You Need to Know About Cities: Skylines
By Publisher Paradox Interactive recently released Cities: Skylines – Expanded Edition, a significantly revamped version of the original game, on Nintendo Switch 2. With better visuals, performance, and tools, it gives Nintendo Switch 2 players a definitive way to experience the city builder’s impressive scale.
If you’re not already familiar with it, Cities: Skylines is an in-depth single-player building sim where you’re mayor of a city that starts as an empty plot of land connected to a nearby highway. It’s up to you to create roads, houses, office buildings, and industrial areas to grow your city while maintaining its infrastructure with power, water, and other services to keep everything running smoothly
That central gameplay loop is still intact, but with new features that make things easier to manage. So even if you played the original when it landed on Nintendo Switch in 2018, there’s a lot more to discover with the optimized Expanded Edition.
Cities Just Got a Lot Bigger
The literal biggest change in the Expanded Edition in comparison to its predecessor on Nintendo Switch is the potential size of your city. Tiles represent about 1.92 km x 1.92 km of space, and the original game limited you to nine tiles of buildable area. In the Expanded Edition, that area has increased to 25 tiles, nearly tripling the land your city can cover.
With such a big building area, you can create some truly gargantuan megacities. You’ll need to plan ahead, though. The bigger your city gets and the more your population grows, the more difficult it will be to manage if you don’t account for things like overloaded roads or public transportation bottlenecks beforehand.
There are lots of different ways to plan your city. If you want to create a touristy beach town, you can do that. If you want downtown to be car-free, you can do that. Or maybe you want to make the world’s most smog-filled industrial behemoth. That’s within your power too, and hey, you don’t actually have to live there.
