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.
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.