A lot of people think very poorly of this game, but I think it is actually much better than its predecessor. As a casual player, it is extremely easy to build beautiful & realistic cities in this game -- and the quality of life improvements (road tools, zoning, utilities, etc.) over the previous game are far cleaner than mods could previously provide. ... Also, many people complained of a performance bug around the game's release... but toying around with the settings for about five seconds (disabling and re-enabling AMD sampling) fixed the issue immediately.

I know that I am not the type of player who gets overly bogged-down by performance when playing a game but I want to start out with a single, very clear comment: even if you think Cities: Skylines II is the exact game for you, do not play it now. To be clear, this isn't even purely because of technical performance either; balance is still in need of being tuned within the sim.

Leading up to its release, I was longingly looking forward to the city-builder. Despite concerns around technical performance, I leaped in. Pre-release material showed that it wasn't the EA-style The Sims-style reset of a game where the new iteration reverts back to 1.0 with little improvements and some steps backwards to gameplay. Cities: Skylines 2 comes out swinging, packing in seasons, additional transportation options, expanded road tools and systems which were added in previous expansions, all now rolled into the base game. The visual updates are pleasant, even if you have to turn them down to get the game to run and your trees look like potatoes, painted green, with a stick shoved up their behinds. The foundations of Cities: Skylines II are great and I think this could be a great game with staying power.

That's fine and all, but what's missing? Well... the new traffic system implemented breaks the game. In an effort to create "real" drivers or pedestrians, the game allows for illegal traffic maneuvers and jaywalking. Big deal, right? Well... pedestrians refuse to use ramps or stairs so if there's a busy intersection, there's no way to divert pedestrians away from it. Cars driving down a road in rush-hour traffic will sometimes hold up traffic as they wait for a gap to do an illegal u-turn. Added a bus lane? Cool, it'll be filled with more cars than busses. I can only assume this was done either 1) by mistake or 2) so they can introduce a KGB-themed DLC that allows you disappear dissidents to a gulag. It's great to be able to add or remove crosswalks or stoplights and I appreciate the new road building tools. However, there's additional refinement I found myself wanting such as left-turn lights or being able to control what are or are not turn lanes in an intersection instead of the game automatically assigning it. The unfortunate truth is that the previous iteration had mods which supported this and now they're about 50% of the way to implementing back that same functionality with no current support for mods.

All that comes back to the initial point: wait. The technical performance will improve. They'll add in the mod support. The pedestrians will finally use a bridge. There's a million small issues that make me want to like this game and can't play because the sim breaks as soon as the town gets above 40k people. I do have confidence with the team and their desire to do right by the customer eventually and provide the support needed. I just wish a lot of the balance and performance had been hammered out before release.

Gameplay: Quite fun city builder. The gameplay loop is engaging and parking is a somewhat new thing to think about. The simulation is quite good and realistic. Stuff like people taking shortcuts over parking lots is super fun.
Gets held back by some things that dont make sense. Like earning money despite the game telling me im in a deficit and other minor things like that. Sadly there are so many things like that they add up. I suspect with patches this is going to get better but for now it stands.
Graphics: Could look good but i had to turn it way down to be playable. Got visual bugs and bad performance anyway. Some of the detail is nice. My biggest gripe is buildings still beeing rectangle. So building anything that looks like its in the eu takes WAY to much work
Completion: Unlocked everything in one city

Grade C: Broken

+ The road snapping is much improved, probably what most people that come from CS1 will notice. Building beautiful roads is infinitely more easier, not to mention that roundabouts are finally a viable road network solution and do not take an entire city block to make.
+ The little details put into traffic flow such as plopping individual stop signs or traffic lights are a god-send. They hired former modders to develop these features, and it shows.
+ The scale is much appreciated - everything feels much more massive. Some buildings even more so than I expected (for example, why is the cemetery the size of an entire airport if I have barely 1k residents?)
- This game has some of the WORST performance that I have seen. I played this on launch day and it was insane that 4060Ti and 5600 cannot run this game on stable 1080p@30fps. Half of my graphics settings had to go down significantly just to maintain somewhat passable framerate. Yes, this isn't a shooter and it is very much playable even on 25 fps, but come on, really?

Later, I learned that the majority of CS2 framerate problems stem from rendering nonsensical high-polygon objects at full resolution. Sounds like something only a rookie indie dev would do, right? No: https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/

Ignoring the elephant in the room for just a second (and let me tell ya, that elephant is one morbidly obese bugger), this actually does a lot of really cool things that I like a lot. Love the roundabouts, the upgradable buildings, the free terraforming, the new progression system, the new electricity and water system, the train yard, etc, I could just keep going. It feels like a proper sequel instead of what I was worried it was going to be: the same game with a 2 on the end. It plays a little differently; it's much slower paced and more focused on the smaller details than before. It's weirdly stripped back in certain aspects (where's all the landmarks, come on lads!) but for the most part it's improved for the better.

BUT, and jesus is that "but" doing a lot of heavy lifting: it's blatantly not finished yet. Not only is buggy, visually ugly and extremely unpolished (those tutorials are dreadful, chirper is not remotely helpful), it also runs like shit. For a game that often looks dramatically worse than the original, I don't really get how they managed to get it running this atrociously. But, y'know, paradox needed a big win for the quarterly earnings, so screw it, we'll fix it in a year, or two, or three.

Polaroid's Mega Rush to the 2023 End!! Game 2!!!

Its a bit unfair to review since it seems to be going through the works after a rough launch- im sure a lot of it will be ironed out a year or so later. However, even with as large of a bone as I wanna throw to Colossal Order, I really don't see any large reason to pick this up at the moment. Cities 1 is a pretty fun tool to mess around with and I've sunk 80 hours into it which im sure is baby numbers compared to others. It's got the simulator expansion pass mania that many others in the genre are privy too but it was pretty fun whenever a sale went around and i felt like filling an extra 5 bucks to round out my cart on one of these DLCs. I never had the full experience but what I had was enough to make cities of a satisfying size and quality to please the management part of my brain for 10s of hours.

Cities 2, while being in its 'vanilla' state integrates a lot of mechanics from the expansions of 1- some of which I hadnt seen yet, and while these were fun enough to toy around with still didn't make up for many of the issues that are plaguing it since launch and the main question haunting it: why would I play this over CS1 right now? I was hoping to get maybe 15-20 hours in before I logged it but after 11 hours on one city I was pretty content to just go ahead and write down my issues/notes and the overall 'loop' got stagnant.

-Game has several performance issues, my computer isnt beefy but there's no way in hell I should be needing to play this in mostly Low settings. Theres a lotta detail that'd be nice to appreicate but comes at a performance cost.
-Lot of vague 'warnings' and bizarre logic behind the simulation aspects. I still don't really understand the idea behind businesses 'not having enough customers'.
-Lotta buildings feel too misleading of their 'range'. I place a recycling center just outside the scope of my city but none of the vehicles seem to reach a building a few blocks away.
-Lotta buildings are WAY too big for their own good. I never really liked how much space certain specialized buildings took up. Maps are larger but the size disparity just never sat right with me. Skyscrapers can still be 4x4 pencil thin monoliths but for some reason a
-I dont know why they took out the detailed 'profit' and 'population' numbers on the UI
-I don't know why there's WAY less policies this time around, arguably one of my favorite mechanics from the last game
-No 'official' mod support at the moment, there's certainly some out there right now but nothing through the steam workshop
-Traffic is sorta improved but only until you hit a certain population, I ended at around 50,000k people in my city. Parking spaces help but aren't a panacea for your traffic woes.
-The changes made to road editing are also pretty nice although I didn't really notice some of these until much later in my city building.

I'm logging this right now pretty low as I think there just isn't enough at the moment to really compel anyone to try this out immediately. Definitely wait a while before picking this up as it's currently more expensive, and has way less support or functionality than the first cities skyline. Maybe I'll do another log in the future once things that been ironed out but I wanted to cap it here after a month of playing this on and off.

I went in expecting the worst when it came to the game's performance, but I think I am more underwhelmed by the game's sim aspects. The performance is bad even with a decent PC, and the hitching feels worst. I empathize with Colossal Order, I think they ultimately got carried away trying to render too much geometry and likely had to release the game early and unoptimized due to contracts with Gamepass or Paradox getting impatient and wanting to start their DLC sales cycle as soon as possible. I think the game will always have this cloud looming over them even if a year from now the game will be running fine for most people.

Instead what I think is really troubling is how shallow a lot of the simulation feels after putting some time into it. Obviously Cities 1 had 8 years of patches, expansions, mods, etc. and this game is starting from scratch, but I feel like I've seen what the game has to offer much sooner than I expected. A lot of the improvements seem like they were done under the hood, and aside from a few quality of life improvements, this is highly similar to Cities 1, and there's no way around it. They could have gone further in any direction... making it more simulatory, more arcadey, something... but it's largely the same game.

Ultimately, the game is fine, and it will be a good base for CO to continue to develop on for the rest of the decade, but it does not make the best first impression. They traded in some old problems for some new ones, let's hope these are easier to fix.

Yes the performance issues are unacceptable.
But also the sim elements of the game are underwhelming. If you follow a citizen around you will see that the kids just stay in their homes 24/7 and don't actually attend school, if someone is going to university they are marked as "student" and may or may not occasionally go to the school and only ever the school. And the working citizens are not much better. So many service building just don't work how you would think. An example is that the incinerator will often take garbage seemingly from neighboring cities rather than prioritizing clearing you own mountains of garbage.
The leveling system is busted because you get a little xp based on population but loads based on building certain buildings, so you can just spam build/bulldoze the same building and have a megacity with under 1000 pop if you wanted. The terrain tools are the worst things to use ever and if you ignore manipulating the terrain all your buildings are going to be sloped and roads are not gonna connect properly because everywhere is so hilly.
BUT WORST OF ALL: seemingly NO autosave?! I haven't had to think about manual saving in years. I lost 2 hours of progress once to a crash and had no idea the game only manually saved.
On a positive note, the progress of unlocking stuff and watching your city grow from a small village to a massive horizon-spanning wall of skyscrapers is quite satisfying and there were times where I was enjoying myself. But that satisfaction is found in any city builder. The elements that were supposed to set this one apart are buggy, computer-crashing, frustrating, or janky at best.

The evolution from Cities Skylines to Cities Skylines II is in my opinion pretty similar to that of The Sims 3 to The Sims 4 or Crusader Kings 2 to Crusader Kings 3. It is a mostly incremental upgrade that serves to reset the base, creating an easier to approach game for newcomers that isn't bloated with 400 dollars worth of DLC.

Naturally this means that many features in the previous game are missing so that the developers can implement these features as DLC once again. That is not to say that there are no improvements in Cities Skylines II or that this is a bad game, just that a player coming from Cities Skylines 1 should not expect the wheel to be reinvented.

It is very much the same game just with a different flavor: more approachable, nicer looking, and primed for many upgrades. Anyone who has gone through multiple generations of The Sims 'upgrades' already understand exactly what is happening.

The game itself is still good though. Even at it's gimped (compared to Cities Skylines 1) state it competes as a top tier City Sim with many of the features you'd expect of such a game and most importantly, it's still fun. The main issue is of course the lackluster (to put it lightly) performance.

This game runs absolutely terribly and might just be one of the worst optimized games of this year. Though I've thankfully not run into any stutter issues, the game is far too demanding on hardware given the fidelity it's able to achieve.

The fact that Cyberpunk 2077 runs better with path tracing than this game does on ultra IN THE MENU is genuinely crazy to me. I personally opt to lower my graphics settings to low with heavy anti-aliasing and resign myself to enjoying 70fps.

I haven't played super long though so as for how performance scales with larger cities I don't yet know. Given the current performance issues though, I think we can make an accurate assumption.

My recommendation for now is to wait for patches to see how performance improves. If you really want to give the game a go either sail the seas or try it out on Game Pass (that's where I'm playing it right now). It's most definitely not worth the full asking price in its current state and as such I can't recommend it.

2/5

well. 9 hours went by in the blink of an eye. my husband kept checking on me to make sure i was .. still alive?

i'm not having any frame drop issues after the initial few minutes of the world loading, or zooming in really fast. i have a 4070, which i see a lot of steam users saying they still lag with. i never changed my graphics settings (other than turning off motion blur) & everything was kept on 'high' settings. i got it through xbox game pass (for $1 rn what the hellll?) & didn't have nearly as many performance issues as people make it seem through steam reviews.

the token system to unlock is really annoying. there's times where i'm just sitting on 3x speed & building the cims more low density residential, waiting for the xp to drop. building roads looks really ugly & i've had to fight with placing things for a long, long time. the new water & electricity was annoying at first, but i got used to it pretty easily. until a transformer was 'bottlenecking.' that took me a few minutes to figure out. upgrading buildings by clicking on them is really nice.

all in all, i still really enjoyed it. though, i think i do prefer 1 still. the new vanilla road settings are nothing compared to TMPE. if i'm enjoying it, i'll probably pick it up on steam for the workshop.. but knowing how many expansion packs they'll add.. i might just keep playing it on game pass.