There is something wonderfully addictive about starting with an empty stretch of land and imagining the bustling metropolis it might one day become. A simple road becomes a residential street, a handful of houses grows into a neighbourhood, and before long you are wrestling with traffic congestion, electricity shortages, overflowing hospitals and citizens who seem determined to complain about absolutely everything. That is the enduring appeal of Cities: Skylines, a city-building simulator that understands the difference between simply constructing a settlement and creating a living, breathing urban environment. With Cities: Skylines: Expanded Edition, Nintendo Switch 2 owners get an enhanced version of the experience, complete with expanded building space, improved construction tools and ten included DLC expansions and content packs.
Originally established as a popular alternative for players seeking a deeper city-building experience, Cities: Skylines has always offered the freedom to create something personal. You can build an efficient, carefully organised metropolis, experiment with an industrial powerhouse, or create a sprawling coastal community where parks and waterfront attractions take centre stage. There is no single blueprint for success, and that freedom is a major part of the appeal. The challenge lies in making your grand ambitions work in practice, because even the most beautiful city will struggle if its roads are clogged, its services are underfunded or its residents cannot get where they need to go.
The Expanded Edition aims to make that experience more comfortable and ambitious on Nintendo’s latest hardware. The original Switch release was necessarily constrained by the system’s limitations, with a maximum of nine buildable tiles restricting the scale of your urban dreams. This new edition raises that limit to 25 tiles, introduces a Map Editor and offers additional control options, alongside graphics settings designed to prioritise either performance or visual quality. These improvements make this more than a simple repackaging of the familiar formula. They give players considerably more room to think like genuine urban planners.
The Joy of Watching a City Come to Life
At its heart, Cities: Skylines is a game about interconnected systems. Roads provide access to buildings, zoning determines how the city develops, and the placement of essential services influences whether your population can thrive. Water, electricity, waste management, education, healthcare and emergency services all demand attention, while your financial decisions determine how much you can afford to build. Each new development brings opportunities, but it also introduces fresh responsibilities, making expansion an ongoing balancing act rather than a straightforward race to fill the map.
That complexity is what makes the experience so satisfying. A new residential district might look like a triumph, but it can quickly become a headache if the surrounding roads cannot cope with the extra traffic. Building a hospital or a school is not simply a matter of placing an attractive structure on the map, because its usefulness depends on accessibility, funding and the needs of the surrounding population. Every decision has the potential to create a chain reaction, and the most successful cities are those where individual pieces work together rather than competing for space and resources.
There is also tremendous creative freedom here. Players can favour dense urban development, spread out into quieter suburban neighbourhoods, or dedicate substantial areas to industry and commerce. Districts and local policies provide another layer of control, allowing different parts of your city to develop distinct identities. A car-free downtown, a carefully managed waterfront or an industrial zone with its own priorities can help make the finished metropolis feel like a collection of communities rather than a mass of identical buildings. The satisfaction comes from seeing your decisions reflected in the character of the city, especially when a district begins to function exactly as you intended.
Of course, not every aspiring mayor will enjoy the administrative side of the job. There are budgets to balance, services to maintain and problems to solve, and players who prefer immediate action may find the slower pace demanding. Yet the complexity is precisely what gives the game its staying power. There is always another improvement to make, another bottleneck to fix or another ambitious project to consider. Even when a city appears to be running smoothly, it is difficult not to wonder whether one more road, railway connection or public service could make it better.
Twenty Five Tiles Changes the Ambition
The most significant addition in this edition is the increase from nine buildable tiles to 25. For a game built around long-term planning, that extra space matters enormously. It gives players greater freedom to spread out their development, create more elaborate road networks, and accommodate the different needs of a growing population without feeling quite so restricted by the map’s boundaries. Instead of constantly compromising on the shape of your city, you have more room to pursue the vision that inspired you in the first place.
That additional land also opens up more possibilities for how a city can be organised. Residential areas can be separated from heavy industry, transport networks can be planned around the wider landscape, and different communities can develop their own identities across a much larger area. There is room to think beyond the immediate demands of the next few buildings and consider how the entire city might function as it grows. For players who enjoy planning an elaborate metropolis from the ground up, this is a substantial improvement to the overall experience.
The inclusion of a Map Editor adds another welcome dimension. Rather than accepting the landscape exactly as presented, players can customise their starting environment before development begins. Shaping terrain, adjusting the placement of natural resources, and preparing transport connections can give a city a more deliberate foundation. It also means the creative process can begin before the first road is built, with the geography itself becoming part of the design.
There is something particularly appealing about tailoring a map to a specific idea. Perhaps you want a settlement shaped around a river, a coastal city built around its harbour, or a sprawling urban centre surrounded by difficult terrain. The Map Editor gives you greater control over the canvas on which those ambitions will take shape. It is a feature that rewards imagination and planning, and one that helps the Expanded Edition feel like a more complete package for players who enjoy the creative side of city building as much as the management.
Better Tools Make Building More Comfortable
A city builder lives or dies by the quality of its construction tools. When you are constantly adjusting roads, placing buildings and refining districts, even small interface improvements can make a considerable difference over the course of a long session. Expanded Edition introduces precision placement, a distance indicator, updated snapping options and a Quick Selection tool to make essential tools and assets easier to access. These are practical additions rather than headline-grabbing features, but they address the everyday work of building a city.
The importance of this becomes clear when you consider how much time players spend shaping their urban layouts. A road network that looks slightly awkward can become an eyesore when repeated across an entire district, while poorly aligned buildings can undermine an otherwise carefully planned neighbourhood. More precise placement gives players greater control over the details, helping them turn a rough arrangement of streets into something that feels thoughtfully designed. Those who enjoy perfecting their layouts should appreciate the extra flexibility.
Keyboard and mouse support is another important addition, particularly for players accustomed to city builders on PC. A controller can work perfectly well for many tasks, but the ability to point, click and position elements with a mouse offers an alternative approach to detailed construction. The edition also retains traditional controller configurations, so players can choose the setup that suits them. That flexibility is especially useful for a game where you may spend one moment managing the wider city and the next making tiny adjustments to a particular junction.
The Environmental Controls Panel provides further opportunities to customise the presentation, allowing players to adjust elements such as the time of day, rain, fog and environmental colouring. These options offer a different way to appreciate a city you have spent hours developing, whether you want to see its skyline under a clear sky or give the streets a more atmospheric appearance. They are not essential to the management side of the simulation, but they add another creative tool to an already flexible experience.
The Challenge of Keeping Everyone Happy
Building a city is one thing. Keeping it functioning is quite another. As the population grows, demands on infrastructure become more complex, and the consequences of poor planning become increasingly difficult to ignore. Traffic is an obvious concern, but it is only one part of the wider puzzle. Public transport, emergency services, education, utilities and the local economy all need to work together if your city is going to flourish.
Traffic management is particularly important because the road network influences so many other aspects of urban life. A poorly planned junction can slow down commuters and public transport while making it harder for emergency vehicles to reach their destinations. District policies can help shape local behaviour, and the available transport systems, including buses, trains and subways, provide different ways to move people around. The challenge is finding a network that suits the scale and layout of your city rather than assuming that adding more roads will automatically solve every problem.
The economic side is equally important. Every new service brings costs, and expanding too aggressively can leave a city struggling to pay for the infrastructure it needs. Cutting corners might provide short-term relief, but neglected services can eventually undermine the happiness and stability of your population. Successful management requires a willingness to think ahead, balancing immediate demands against the long-term benefits of sensible investment.
This is where Cities: Skylines can become genuinely engrossing. A city is not a static construction project but a collection of systems that constantly influence one another. Solving one problem can expose another, and the most satisfying victories often come from recognising the underlying cause rather than simply reacting to the latest complaint. It encourages patience, experimentation and a willingness to admit that even the most carefully considered plans sometimes need to be reworked.
Ten Included Content Packs Add More Possibilities
The Expanded Edition includes ten DLC expansions and content packs, giving players a broader selection of material from the outset. Among the headline additions are After Dark, which focuses on the city’s nighttime identity; Snowfall, which introduces winter-themed challenges and transport considerations; Green Cities, which offers more environmentally conscious development options; and Sunset Harbor, which adds maritime and transport-related possibilities. The package also includes Map Pack 3, Country Road, Pearls from the East, Deep Focus Radio, Carols, Candles & Candy, and Match Day.
The variety is welcome, as it gives players more ways to express their preferred style of city building. Those who enjoy creating environmentally conscious neighbourhoods have additional options to explore, while others may prefer to develop a city with a stronger focus on transport, tourism or waterfront activity. Seasonal and nighttime themes can also change the character of a familiar urban environment, making it feel different from a purely daytime construction project. Combined with the expanded map size, the included content gives players more opportunities to experiment with different ideas.
It is worth remembering, however, that this is a collection of selected expansions and content packs rather than every piece of additional content released for the wider game. Players already familiar with the extensive PC catalogue should not assume that the Expanded Edition contains everything available elsewhere. Even so, the included selection provides a substantial range of extra material, and newcomers have plenty to explore without needing to assemble a collection of add-ons separately.
Presentation and Performance on Nintendo Switch 2
The move to Nintendo Switch 2 gives the game the chance to present its sprawling urban environments with greater visual clarity and more flexible performance options. Players can choose a Performance setting targeting 60 frames per second with upscaling and adjusted quality settings, or a Quality setting targeting 30 frames per second with a greater emphasis on visual fidelity. That choice is useful because different players will have different priorities. Some will value a smoother view while navigating the city, while others may prefer to prioritise how their buildings, roads and surrounding landscapes appear.
A city builder also poses a particular challenge for portable hardware because the simulation becomes more complex as the population grows. More residents mean more vehicles, more public transport activity and greater demands on the services that keep everything running. The Expanded Edition’s additional space gives players the opportunity to create much larger cities, making the quality of the underlying simulation and the interface especially important. The supplied feature description promises improvements designed for Switch 2, although the precise experience will naturally depend on the size and complexity of the city being managed.
Visually, the greatest pleasure comes from stepping back and appreciating what you have created. A well-planned skyline, a network of busy streets and neighbourhoods with their own character can make the map feel like a genuine urban environment rather than a collection of individual buildings. The environmental controls add further scope for presenting that city in different conditions, while the expanded building area provides a larger canvas for ambitious projects. It is the sort of game where the best view is often the one that lets you appreciate how far your little settlement has come.
The portable format remains an appealing part of the package, too. City building lends itself to short sessions in which you make a few adjustments, address a pressing problem or plan the next stage of expansion, while longer sessions allow you to lose yourself in a complex redevelopment project. With controller, keyboard and mouse options available, players have more choice in how they approach the experience. The real attraction is having a substantial creative project available on a system that can be used both at home and on the move.
Verdict: A City Builder With Room to Dream
Cities: Skylines: Expanded Edition builds on an already compelling formula by giving Nintendo Switch 2 players more space, more tools and a generous selection of additional content. The increase to 25 buildable tiles is the standout improvement, directly addressing one of the limitations of the original Switch release and enabling more ambitious urban designs. The Map Editor and enhanced construction tools give creative players greater control, while keyboard and mouse support offers a welcome alternative to traditional controller input.
The core appeal remains as strong as ever. Planning a road network, watching a neighbourhood develop and gradually transforming an empty landscape into a thriving city can be immensely rewarding, particularly as the consequences of your decisions unfold. Its management systems provide plenty of challenges, and the relationship between traffic, public services, finances and population growth gives every major project a sense of consequence. The additional content packs expand the possibilities without diminishing the freedom to build a city that reflects your own imagination.
There are still reasons to approach the package with realistic expectations. The included content is not the entirety of the game’s wider DLC catalogue, and a simulation of this scale will always demand patience from players who want to understand its many interconnected systems. The long-term experience will also depend on how the simulation handles increasingly ambitious cities, something that cannot be established from the feature list alone. Nevertheless, the improvements outlined for Switch 2 make this an attractive proposition for anyone who has wanted to take the city-building experience further on a Nintendo console.
Ultimately, the greatest achievement of Cities: Skylines is the way it makes urban planning feel personal. Every road, park, railway and neighbourhood becomes part of a larger story, and every successful expansion feels like something you have earned through careful thought and experimentation. Expanded Edition offers a bigger canvas on which to tell that story, giving aspiring mayors more freedom to make their ideas a reality. If you have ever looked at an empty map and imagined the city that could rise from it, this is an invitation to roll up your sleeves, get planning and see just how far your ambitions can take you.
