Cities: Skylines aims to please all the people in Parklife
And they all go hand-in-hand
It feels rare for a week to go by where Paradox don't announce another expansion for their growing stable of strategy and simulation sandboxes, but it's also hard to complain when they look as nice as Parklife, the next expansion for Cities: Skylines. Adding yet another direction for your perfect city to grow in, Parklife - unsurprisingly - spans parks of all kinds, from national forests full of hiking trails right up to cash-guzzling corporate theme parks, and it's due out next month.
Parklife allows you to designate a chunk of land as a dedicated park district; a tourist spot and recreation site however you slice it, but the contents of it can range from a dense woodland nature reserve to public zoo, all the way up to a heritage site with some preposterous lord's castle sitting at the top of it all. I hope there's an option to eat the rich git, but I somehow doubt it.
The new park districts in this expansion are governed by their own set of rules and policies. Being parkland, you're probably not going to want to have main roads cutting through everything, but fortunately you'll be allowed to place functional buildings adjacent to footpaths for once. Decorative props can also be placed anywhere within the district as you see fit.
As is standard for Paradox, the release of Parklife will be accompanied by a major free update for Cities: Skylines, adding a bunch more features and quality-of-life improvements, including a general rework to the tourism system, UI and some improvements to the mod tools. The patch will also make the camera a little more flexible and introduce some inherent tweaks to the nature of foliage that should result in lower noise pollution in heavily forested areas.
Cities Skylines: Parklife is due out next month on May 24th, and is priced at £10.25/$13.50, and a couple quid extra for a 'Plus' version which includes a new 16-track radio station with a Dixieland/Bluegrass vibe as well as some other cosmetic gubbins. You can wishlist or pre-order it as you so please over on Steam.