Cities Skylines

After what seemed like a long, long time, Cities Skylines arrived and delivered a city-building experience that truly succeeds old-school SimCity. The sheer joy of getting your city up and running, watching it buzz about as you beautify it, manifests excellently in Cities: Skylines. Throw in Steam Workshop support for mods, tons of support from the developer and plenty of content updates for even more long-term replay value.

Electronic Arts continues to expand its Origin Access service with some pretty strong titles across various genres. The publisher announced that this month would see Tropico 5, Opus Magnum, Project Highrise, Deponia, Tharsis, Cosmic Star Heroine, Slime-san Superslim Edition, and Sudden Strike 4 entering the Vault. Don’t worry – there are some decent standouts in that bunch.

Tropico 5, for instance, is a decent city-building management title from Haemimont Games (currently working on Surviving Mars). With Tropico 6 coming up, it’s a good way to get into the series. Zachtronics’ Opus Magnum is a puzzle game that focuses on “programming” and discovering multiple solutions for different puzzles. It’s crazy addictive in a good way, though not for the less puzzle-oriented players.

Cosmic Star Heroine is a pretty good turn-based RPG title from Zeboyd Games that’s very underrated. Daedalic’s Deponia is an excellent point and click adventure title with good writing (especially for those who like comedies). Overall, with a growing collection of titles, early access demos, and deals on EA digital content, Origin Access Basic continues to be a good deal at $5 per month and $30 per year.

PlayStation Plus has updated its Instant Game Collection to include free games for May 2016.

The free games include Switch Galaxy Ultra, Table Top Racing: World Tour and Tropico 5. Among these, Tropico 5 is perhaps the most recommended since it allows you to control a banana republic and keep it thriving (or steal all the money for yourself and abscond). Mix in historical missions and hiring one’s family for important government tasks and you have the potential for some real entertainment.

PS3 users receive Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 and LocoRoco Cocoreccho!, both solid options and complements to the rest of the line-up. Perhaps the biggest star this month is God of War: Ghost of Sparta on the PlayStation Vita, even if it’s one of the weaker games in the series. Switch Galaxy Ultra is also available for PlayStation Vita.

What are your thoughts on this month’s free PlayStation Plus games? Let us know in the comments below and stay tuned for more details.

Tropico 5’s Espionage expansion, which adds a whole new flavor to the popular city simulation, is now available on the PlayStation 4. The new expansion comes with a new, six mission long campaign titled ‘The Maltese Toucan’ (which is almost certainly a riff on the titles of Robert Ludlum novels), in which you must defend the island’s treasures against secret agents at all costs.

The expansion adds new music, new maps, new buildings, and more to the game. If you are at all a fan of the game, then it will probably add an all new twist to your city simulation. The full list of what it adds to the game follows:

• 9 new spy and military themed buildings
• 4 new island maps: “Dos Torres” and “Grito Grande”
• 4 new music tracks
• 4 new avatar costumes: “Evening Gown” (female), “Tuxedo” (male)
• 6 new avatar accessories: “Spy” (hat), “Long Curls” (hair), and more
• New sandbox tasks and events, with the new ‘espionage’ setting
• All new content, plus new spying mechanics, all of which is also available in existing Sandbox maps and in all multiplayer modes.

Tropico 5: Espionage is available from PSN for £15.99.

The tropical city builder sim, Tropico 5, will be coming over to the Xbox One in Spring 2016; so far, the game has been released on the PC (naturally), in addition to the PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s own Xbox 360. This will mark its debut on Microsoft’s next generation console.

To make up for the delayed launch, the developer has promised extra exclusive content for the Xbox One version. Tropico 5 Xbox One Edition will contain the full version of the game plus  the ‘Bayo del Ofato’, ‘Big Cheese’, ‘Mad World’, ‘Generalissimo’ and ‘Joint Venture’ add-ons, the first expansion pack ‘Waterborne’ and five new, exclusive Xbox One sandbox maps as well as a new controller-optimized user interface and of course Xbox Live Achievements.

Tropico 5 marks the fifth outing for the tropical city building series, which lets you play as a quirky overlord dictator of a city. You can check it out now on PS4, Xbox 360, and PC. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage of the Xbox One version as well.

Although Tropico 5 has always had you play a dictator – which in modern social and political constructs, may often be construed as ‘evil’ – this new update to the game will let you become a full on supervillain, complete with evil world domination plans, a secret evil supervillain lair, and loads of lasers.

The new DLC, which is out now for the PC version of the game via Steam and the Kalypso launcher, adds a whole bevy of features for the aspiring evil politician:

• New standalone scenario: “Supervillain“ – Prepare to conquer the world from your top secret hideout
• New building: Giant Laser – The ultimate tool of destruction. Let them come!
• New dynasty avatar accessory: A villainous moustache
• New sandbox map: Isla del Pescado
• New music track and additional voice recordings

The update is currently available only for the PC version, for £2.49/€2.99/$3.99. Tropico 5 itself is also available on Xbox 360 and PS4.

Tropico 5, the fifth entry in the city sim and management series with a tropical flair, will finally be launching for the PlayStation 4 in April, the publisher announced today. This will also mark the series’ first appearance on PlayStation consoles- previously, Tropico has shown up on Xbox, thanks to the Tropico 5 Xbox 360 port that released last year.

The game, which will be launching on April 24 in Europe, and April 28 in North America, also got an announcement for a Limited Edition, which includes The Big Cheese DLC and the Bayo Del Olfato sandbox map, plus an official Tropican passport and postcard for no extra charge.

Tropico 5 will be available at retail, and also digitally via the PSN Store, for £49.99/€59.99/$59.99.. Stay tuned to GamingBolt as we bring you more coverage and information on the game, including more news and our official review. Also be sure to check out the launch trailer for the PS4 version above- it’ll give you some idea of what you are about to get into.

We’ve already known for a while that the fifth entry in the long running, stylized and whimsical city sim series, Tropico 5, will be coming to the PlayStation 4. If you have, however, been wondering just how the game will look or work on the console – which is far more limited than a PC in terms of both, its hardware resources and power, as well as the controller input options it has to offer – then wonder no more, this newest video answers those questions. Well, a little anyway.

It seems to actually work well- not much of a surprise, given that the game already managed to make a successful transition to the Xbox 360 last year, which is even more limited than the PlayStation 4 in all of these regards.

The PlayStation 4 version of the game is due out some time later this year; the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game launched last year. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage and information.

With that being said, the base game is just as solid as its predecessors, offering deep and intricate trading and populace simulation. The expansion, like its base game, does a wonderful job of giving players a number of approaches to playing the game. It also presents just as many ways of reaching the endgame content as the base title.

"The policies can offer you some freedom for how you lead your people, but they can feel useless during the later stages of play."

It opens up with a somewhat limited, albeit comical, character creation screen that can see your dictator take the form of a corn-rowed, lennon-styled, glasses wearing, trench coat clad agent of subterfuge. That is however, about as far as it goes. The character creation screen is very limited in its options, even going so far as preventing you from choosing a name for your character,you must instead choose from a predetermined list.

Once the game begins, you will instantly fall back into your regular Tropico pace. Building your empire feels just as hollow as before, putting an emphasis on your own creative drive and want of ruling those beneath you. Despite the advisors pushing you down a development path that will help your people grow, there is no sense of an overall driving narrative.

I was made aware of a ruling King that I would do odd jobs for in an attempt to appease him. He soon died and was apparently replaced by a new king, without so much of a “meet the new guy in charge” message. This lack of feedback keeps the game feeling disjointed and lacking any serious outsider influences that would change how you build your island.

"One of the largest problems with this DLC is the more recently introduced construction menus which obscure a large portion of the screen and, like the policy menus, are poorly presented."

Unlike Kalypso Media Digital’s other world building game, the expansion seem to be considerably more simple than previous iterations of the game, even across multiple difficulty levels. Within 45 minutes of starting the game I was consistently churning out profits and my approval rating from the populace never dropped below 60%. After one hour I had already declared independence from the established rule and set about making allies for the upcoming war.

Once independence was mine, the game opened up a little, but to no great degree that made it feel new or special. As usual, your advisors will come to you with chances to further your own gains by manipulating trade or rigging elections. When the great war broke out, I drove up the price of Iron and sold it to the allies whilst holding political talks with the Axis forces to grow my revolutionaries.

The policies can offer you some freedom for how you lead your people, but they can feel useless during the later stages of play. Despite never losing any elections and never needing to resort to fixing the ballot count, I was still able to run an authoritative police state. This was mostly thanks to me using my excessive wealth to support low income families with extra food and support the entire island in the wake of natural disasters which can really throw a spanner in the works.

"The “new campaign and story spanning 6 challenging missions” are, as I mentioned, somewhat lacking in the way of new content and I find it hard to justify the expansions somewhat high price point."

At one point, my island was struck by an unfortunate series of events. A rebel invasion forced me to invest in a number of military buildings to protect the island, leaving me low in excess funds. Following their attack, a storm consisting of three twisters struck the island partially destroying a number of homes. After this, a tsunami struck the island, flooding great swathes of coastal homes. One of the policies in the game is a relief fund for those affected by the disasters. So having access to the policies is still interesting and useful, but only if you don’t have enough cash to throw at the problem, plus the menus are just obtuse enough to make you avoid using them as intended.

One of the largest problems with this DLC is the more recently introduced construction menus which obscure a large portion of the screen and, like the policy menus, are poorly presented. All of your dealings in matters of trade and policy are handled through a series of unintuitive menus that would be better suited in a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis. These menus make the progression hard to track as most things are represented by small avatars and overly brief descriptions with no real connecting threads to keep progress easily traceable.

The “new campaign and story spanning 6 challenging missions” are, as I mentioned, somewhat lacking in the way of new content and I find it hard to justify the expansions somewhat high price point. They bring little in the way of new content to the game and you really only get your moneys worth from the new vehicles and offshore constructions that open up new trade avenues. But beyond this, the DLC does fall short of expectations.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Will Tropico 5 run at 1080p and 60 fps on the PlayStation 4?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: Unlike most games, Tropico 5 is a game with open-ended, unpredictable visuals – it is all about building your own island, however you like it. We’re focused on maintaining a locked 30 fps even in the late stages of the game, when your city is huge and bristling with life. The resolution is 1080p.

What kind of upgrades have you done to the game’s engine to accommodate the PS4? Furthermore, how easy or difficult was it to port the engine over the PS4 ?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: We’re offloading more and more work to the additional CPU cores offered by the PS4 – which will ultimately benefit other platforms, too. Most of the porting work was in the low-level rendering code, since the graphics API is pretty different. Porting was a long period of nothing or almost nothing visible on the screen, and suddenly most of the game was up and running at an amazing framerate! None of that “1 fps barrier” notorious in the previous console generation.

"Our engine uses a so-called “deferred lighting” rendering pipeline, the kind of which makes hardware-assisted antialiasing like MSAA harder, so right now we're sticking with our postprocessing, image-based antialiasing.

PlayStation 4 features 8GB RAM memory. This is more than the average RAM found in PCS. How has this helped in development of the PS4 version?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: In our previous console ports, fitting the game in the available RAM was a significant effort. Now this problem simply disappeared, as, indeed, we have access to more memory on the PS4 than we have on PC.

Are there any plans to use the touchpad feature of the DualShock 4 controller? If yes, can you please describe it?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: No it doesn’t.

From a top level, what are the differences between the PC and PS4 versions?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: Between our support for cross-platform multiplayer (which requires the same game logic running on both sides), and our plans to bring the visual improvements done for the PS4 version back to the PC via free updates, the game you’ll experience on the PS4 will exactly match what you can get on a (fairly high-end) PC.

Did you face any issues while developing on the PlayStation 4?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: A new platform is always a challenge, but overall, it was easier than expected.

Can you let us know what kind of anti-aliasing solution will the PS4 version use?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: Our engine uses a so-called “deferred lighting” rendering pipeline, the kind of which makes hardware-assisted antialiasing like MSAA harder, so right now we’re sticking with our postprocessing, image-based antialiasing.

"This is our first game for any Sony platform, and we're pleasantly surprised.

Given that you guys work on multiplatform games, what are your thoughts on PS4’s API?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: This is our first game for any Sony platform, and we’re pleasantly surprised. We’re looking forward to spending more time with PS4 on future projects.

What kind of changes and bug fixes have you carried out in the console versions of the game?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: Tropico 5 is still under fairly active development. Hundreds, if not thousands of small bugs and performance optimizations have been made since the initial PC release, and will be shipped in both the console versions and, as patches, in the PC version.

Are there any plans to add new content in to the console version?

Ivan-Assen Ivanov: We have lots of plans for the future of Tropico but it is too early to talk about them.