Cities Skylines 2 Park Adventures release date is December 2: price, zoos, amusement parks and five new maps

Cities Skylines 2 Park Adventures release date and platforms

The Cities Skylines 2 Park Adventures release date is December 2, 2026. The Steam page lists that date, and press coverage of the announcement on November 10 adds that the expansion also arrives on the Microsoft Store for PC. It is a PC-only release, and it requires the base game, Cities: Skylines II, to play. The Steam page lists Iceflake Studios as developer and Paradox Interactive as publisher.

Park Adventures is the first original expansion Iceflake has made for the game, according to Gaming Trend, and it is part of Cities: Skylines II: Expansion Pass II. The Steam page notes that the content is not yet available, so everything below is what the developer says it will ship, not what players have tested.

Price and what Expansion Pass II includes

Press coverage gives a suggested standalone price of $19.99, £16.99 or €19.99. Steam is less helpful on this point: the store page lists only the Expansion Pass 2 bundle, at $44.99, which includes Park Adventures and seven other items, and shows no separate price for the expansion. Until the standalone listing appears, treat the $19.99 figure as the publisher's suggested price relayed by the press.

Anyone who already owns Expansion Pass II gets Park Adventures at no extra cost, since it is part of the pass. For everyone else, the maths is simple: the bundle makes sense if you want the remaining content in it, and the standalone expansion makes sense if parks are the only thing you want.

One detail worth knowing before you buy: the two prices come from different places. The $19.99 figure is relayed by the press from the announcement, while the $44.99 bundle price comes from the Steam page itself. We have not seen a standalone Steam listing yet, so if the expansion matters to you, check the live store page on launch day rather than relying on either number.

What parks, zoos and nature reserves add to the city

The Steam description splits parks into three kinds. City parks come with tea houses and conservatories. Amusement parks bring rollercoasters. Nature reserves add hiking trails and lodges. Zoos can be added to any park. Parks grow and level up as they attract visitors, unlocking new attractions along the way, which makes them a long-term project rather than a one-off placement.

The store page sums up the pitch in one line: "Parks aren't decoration. They're destinations." In practice that means a park is no longer a green tile that raises land value, but a destination with its own visitor numbers, and the expansion is aimed at players who want a city's leisure districts to behave like a small economy.

Zoos being addable to any park is the quiet design choice here. It means a player is not choosing between a zoo district and a nature reserve, but layering attractions inside one destination, and the level-up system suggests the reward for doing so is a bigger visitor base over time. That is a different kind of progression from the unlock-a-service model most city builders use for parks.

A recreation tab, ticket prices and maintenance

The management side is where Park Adventures differs most from earlier decorative content. A new recreation tab shows profit and loss for the whole city and for each individual park. Players can set ticket prices, staff budgets, maintenance costs and visitor policies, and the Steam page warns that underfunded maintenance leads to unsafe facilities and unhappy guests.

That is a trade-off most city builders have not asked players to make for leisure spaces. A cheap ticket fills a zoo but starves the budget that keeps it safe. Whether the balance is interesting or fiddly will only be clear once players have hours in it, but the design intent is a loop with real consequences rather than a cosmetic add-on.

The practical implication is for players who run tight budgets. Parks now compete with roads, power and services for money, and the store page's own warning about unsafe facilities suggests neglect has a visible cost. We cannot say how steep that cost is without hands-on time, and neither the Steam page nor the press coverage we read gives numbers for visitor counts, ticket revenue or maintenance rates.

Five new maps and 100-plus assets

The expansion adds more than 100 new assets, covering park buildings, zoo enclosures and animals, nature reserve structures and amusement rides. It also brings five new maps with different climates: arid, tropical, boreal, alpine and Mediterranean. Each biome suits a different kind of park, from a desert safari to an alpine nature reserve.

Gaming Trend also reports that a free update, Seasonal Shift, shipped alongside the announcement with upscaler support for DLSS 4.5, FSR 3 and XeSS 3, plus improvements to Paradox Mods and the open beta. That update is separate from the paid expansion.

A set of five climates also changes what a park can be. An alpine nature reserve and a tropical zoo have little in common visually, so the maps give the 100-plus assets room to look different from one another rather than repeating a single theme across every save.

System requirements and the free-to-play window

The Steam page lists minimum requirements of Windows 10 Home 64-bit, an Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, 8 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GTX 970 with 4 GB or AMD RX 480 with 8 GB, and 60 GB of storage. Recommended is an Intel Core i5-12600K or AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 16 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA RTX 3080 or AMD RX 6800 XT.

If you have not tried the base game, press coverage says Cities: Skylines II is free to play on Steam from November 12 to November 16, 2026. That window is the cheapest way to check whether your PC copes with the game before the expansion lands.

What we could not confirm before launch

There are gaps worth stating plainly. We have no hands-on impressions, because the expansion is not yet playable, and the Steam page lists it as unavailable. We found no developer quotes in the press coverage we opened, so the "destinations" line quoted above comes from the Steam page copy rather than an interview. No console release has been announced.

The free-to-play window from November 12 to 16 is reported by the press rather than shown on the Steam page we opened, so check the store if you plan to use it. None of this changes the date, which both the Steam page and the coverage agree on, but it is a reminder that an announcement is a plan, not a product.

Our take

Park Adventures is a sensible next step for a city builder that has been rebuilding goodwill through content. The profit-and-loss framing is the interesting part. The release date is solid, the price is the press's figure rather than a store listing, and the real test starts on December 2.