Cities: Skylines is next week's free Epic Store game

Colossal Order's acclaimed city builder Cities: Skylines will be free on the Epic Games Store starting next Thursday, 10th March.

Cities: Skylines is hardly a spring chicken at this point, of course, having originally laid its urban foundations on PC back in 2015, but it still delivers an enormously enjoyable spin on the classic city-building formula, alongside ample tools catering to a range of different players - from aesthetics-obsessed urban planners to those more interested in logistical optimisation.

And if you happen to enjoy the base game, there is plenty more where that came from. Since its arrival in 2015, Cities: Skylines has continued to expand across various free updates and (in the time-honoured fashion of publisher Paradox Interactive) has received a positively quivering heap of DLC, from music and cosmetic packs to full-size gameplay expansions - January's Airports expansion being the most recent, bringing the total tally up to ten.

Those that grab Cities: Skylines when it goes free on the Epic Store between Thursday, 10th March and 17th March (the first time it's done so since Christmas 2020) won't get any of its DLC, but there's still plenty of enjoyment to be wrought from the game in its base state.

And if you're in the market for more freebies, Black Widow: Recharged and Centipede: Recharged (both spruce-ups of the old Atari arcade games) can be added to your Epic Games Store library at a cost of no additional pee until next Thursday, 10th March.