‘Cities: Skylines’ will be free on the Epic Games Store for a week

Cities: Skylines is the next free game on the Epic Games Store, and fans will have a week to pick up the city-building sim at no cost.

Cities: Skylines will be free to pick up starting next Thursday (March 10) and will remain free to keep until March 17.

“Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation,” reads the Epic Games Store page for Cities: Skylines. “It introduces new gameplay elements to realise the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience.”

The simulator is fairly in-depth and has players consider issues regarding traffic and mayoral policies around town, all while ensuring essential services such as electricity and education remain available to all citizens.

Cities: Skylines will take over from Black Widow: Recharged and Centipede: Recharged, which are free to download right now but will return to their usual price on March 10.

Last month, NME reported on some drama within the Cities: Skylines community, when a modder was banned following the discovery of significant malware risk. The disgruntled modder in question – going by Chaos – had implemented malicious code into several of their projects, which targeted Colossal Order employees and fellow modders to make their games run poorly.

Colossal Order later confirmed that they had banned the modder and several mods for targeting the performance of specific players, though said that “no keyloggers, viruses, bitcoin mining software, or similar” were found in the Steam Workshop mods.

In other gaming news, Ubisoft has delayed its upcoming strategy game, The Settlers. Though it was meant to launch on March 17, the studio has pushed it back to “a later date” due to feedback provided by players in a recent closed beta.