Cities: Skylinesisa challenging and complex gamewith a lot of moving parts and an intricate traffic system. Even experienced city builders can get headaches as they try to keep the highways and arterial roads clear and meet the happiness needs of every citizen. However, for some experienced players, the base game is a little too easy.
Perhaps they’ve figured out all the traffic exploits, or maybe they’ve built all the monuments that make life easier and want to balance things out by making other aspects of the game harder. For this sort of player, the developers ofCities: Skylineshave included a hard mode that ramps up the difficulty in several ways. However, the hard mode switch is tucked away in a corner that isn’t very obvious.
RELATED:Addicting City Building Games With Unique Themes, For Fans Of SimCity
Where to Find Hard Mode
The first thing players should do to activate hard mode inCities: Skylinesis to check the Content Manager. Players will find it in the main menu. The Content Manager lets playersactivate and deactivate a variety of modsand save games, maps, and other content created by the developers and other players as DLC. Not every platform supports all player-made content, but luckily, the hard mode mod comes with the base version of the game.
To find it, players should choose the “Mods” category in the Content Manager. Hard mode is right there on the list, along with cheats thatmake the game easier like unlimited money, unlimited oil and ore, and unlimited soil. They’ll simply need to click the button labeled “On/Off” and hard mode will be active the next time players start or load a game. If hard mode gets to be too much, players can return to this screen and turn it off at any time.
Something players should watch out for is that just like any other mod in this category,hard mode will disable achievements. This means there’s no achievement for playing or beating hard mode, and players will need to turn it back off if they want any achievements for their in-game accomplishments. As such, the only reason to activate hard mode is for the additional challenge it provides.
What Hard Mode Does
One thing the content manager screen doesn’t do is explain what hard mode does. Fortunately, this information is easy enough to find.
Cities: Skylinesis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
