Review — Cities: Skylines II

Build the city of your dreams and develop it into a thriving metropolis in Cities: Skylines 2.

More than eight years after its original release and a plethora of expansions, developer Colossal Order undertook the tough job of releasing the sequel of what is known as the most complete and best city simulation game available. The result as such is more evolution than revolution.

😁 The Wonderful

• Building a city is both complex and child’s play in Skylines II. The game is excellent in having great amounts of depth without portraying itself as overtly complex, meaning that both experienced and beginner players can have a great time when playing the game, regardless if it’s a 30 minutes snack or a long four hour play session.

🙂 The Good

• Cities: Skylines II builds upon a working UI from its predecessor and improves upon it smartly. Apart from that, it fixed, updated and improved frustrating outdated systems like electricity and water/waste management and gets rid of annoyances such as abandoned buildings needing manual demolishing, traffic AI not being smart enough, the list goes on. They’ve paid attention in what needed to improve and delivered.
• Bigger and as detailed as ever, that’s what the second installment of the series is. The player starts with one square plot; a plot that is already quite sizable. Now imagine being able to buy tens of plots and make one huge city, surrounded by other villages. Think about it like this: in previous games you were able to build New York, now you’re able to build New York, Brooklyn, New Jersey and Staten Island.
• In spite of performance issues (see below), Cities Skylines II has a beautiful look to it, especially considering the scope and breath of possibilities the game has to offer. You can zoom in almost all the way to street level to really get a knack of how living in your self-built city ‘feels’, while also seeing the skyline from above by zooming out far above the clouds. Gorgeous.

😒The Bad

• Already quite of an annoyance in the first game, financial city management is still in no-man’s land. They clearly toned down the difficulty and stopped hindering players from continuing city growth in the first few hours of the game, but failed to actually implement a city money management mechanism that feels substantial and fun.
• Given the scope and graphical fidelity the game can offer, a beefed up PC rig is advised. However, sadly, the game released in quite a bad state when it comes to performance, with low frame rates even on the highest tiers of specs. Luckily, the developers are aware and since release they’ve addressed the fact that there are issues and are hard at work to patch it out.
• It’s not necessarily that bad, but it’s wildly over-engineered and poorly executed: the skill points system to unlock new buildings. It’s half-baked into the game with little systems incentivizing you to have a look. The idea behind it, makes sense, locking ‘special’ buildings in a skill tree so you can choose to specialize in a certain area (i.e. my city is very developed in terms of healthcare).

🫣 The Ugly

• What is going on with terraforming in this game? Holy moly, I’ve just given up at this point. Landscaping your terrain is nearly impossible and it’s incomprehensible to me that they’ve even shipped this in this state. Even the most expert Skylines players are circumnavigating the borked system with silly workarounds. It’s beyond bad.

Conclusion

The best remains the best. Cities: Skylines II has replaced its predecessor as the best city management game. While it’s by no means faultless & lacking in content in some areas, it’s an overdue next step. It’s hard to compare a game with 20+ expansions and hundreds of mods with a freshly released base game. However, there’s no question about it: Cities Skylines II has all tools and systems in place to become and stay the best and most advanced city building and management game for the next decade.

4.5/5

Reviewed on PC.
Download code provided by publisher.