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.