Cities: Skylines 2 Review - An Unfinished Skyscraper

It took several years, dozens of DLC and content packs, and the hard work of hundreds of modders, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cities: Skylines can now be considered the definitive city builder of this generation. That’s an incredible burden to bear when it comes to releasing a sequel, but Colossal Order has nailed it. Cities: Skylines 2 is a fantastic game, and in ten years' time, it’ll be perfect.

I was conflicted when I first booted up Cities 2. In fact, I’v🌠e rewritten this review two or three times as my mentality has changed towards the game over close to 60 hours of playtime. At first, I was upset, because my £300 worth of DLC for the first game has now been completely nullified. I just want to build my own custom park. Why, Colossal Order, must I pay £20 to build my own custom park?

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But as I play more, I realize that this sort of wiping the slate clean is necessary for what the team has done with the sequel. The cities feel more alive than ever and traffic actually reflects the real-time movement of your citizens. This is massive. During rush hꦆour, there are traffic jams. Citizens can no longer put their car in their pocket and take a jolly down a pedestrian path, only to whip it out on the other end. They need to park their cars. To an outsider who knows nothing of Cities: Skylines this probably sounds insignificant, but it has such a sizable impact on gameplay. It has completely changed how I view my little minions. They’re a lot more real, and that’s what I, and so many fans of the original game, have always wanted. This change is built into the very fabric of the game and its engine—not the sort of thing you could’ve released as a DLC.

This realness is reflected in zoning. In the first game, your ci🐼ties always sort of ended up as these homogenous blobs of highly educated and mega-rich citizens. Once you’d finished building an area, it could be left on its own to silently prosper. That is not the case in Cities: Skylines 2. Areas need constant management, rezoning for low rent or mixed use properties, services need upgrading and traffic management is more intricate than ever before—with some road management tools actually built into the vanilla game.

Your city grows organically. Thanks to the new development༺ tree system, you are never overwhelmed with a barrage of choices. You can pick and choose your way through how your city grows and won’t feel pressured to upgrade your services unless you decide it’s time to do so. Alongside more intuitive systems for buses, trains, and other services, Cities: Skylines 2 feels more accessible than ever. I actually spent time building a beautiful train station. In hundreds of hours with the first game, I barely touched the trains. But here, it’s so much easier to create something that looks and feels realistic.

The game looks crystal clear, but I have to be opaque here. We received two or three emails about poor performance, letting us know that the game had received a patch that improved performance. It feels like this is still ongoing. The game was updated twice ꧟while I reviewed it. Originally, without adjus🧸ting settings, the game’s performance was pretty shocking—and I’ve got a 4090, 64gb RAM, the whole works. It was glitchy, with strange fuzzy visuals. Frames dropped constantly. I was worried. But, in the final version of the game, the one I’ve just finished playing before writing this review, it’s running smoothly.

Cities Skylines 2 a view across a city with lowrise buildings, apartment blocks, and some distant mountains

The level 🌠of detail in Cities: Skylines 2 is worlds apart from its predecessor. Every building is built brick by brick, in 4K. Little glimpses inside people’s apartments (w♏eird, but I’m the mayor, LET ME IN). I can’t wait to see what modders do with this level of fidelity. In terms of release performance though, I can’t comment further than my own experience—I know other creators and reviewers will release detailed performance breakdowns. It worked smoothly for me in the end. Will it work smoothly for you? It depends on your system.

And that brings us to a big sticking point in the community right now. You may or mayꦺ not have heard that Paradox and Colossal Order are not going to allow mods on the Steam Workshop for Cities: Skylines 2. Instead, they’ll be moving over to Paradox Mods. This is a big deal because without the Steam Workshop it’s unlikely that Cities Skylines would have ever achieved its cult status. There are over 400,000 mods on the workshop for the first game. It’s an enormous library of user-generated content. I can’t judge the Paradox Mods platform because I’ve never used it, and likewise, I’ve got no idea what CO has planned for the platform—I do know that modders have already been invited to test out the mechanics and the game. This doesn’t impact my review because we simply don’t know how it’s going to work yet, but it’ll be important to the game’s future.

Cities Skylines 2 train on the tracks with factories in the background

Even without the mods, you’ve got an experience here worthy of your time. For new players there’s a bunch to learn, and for those returning after spending many evenings in Cities: Skylines, there’s a lot of new stuff to get to grips with as well. I had to reconfigure my brain to love parking lots, because my citizens love parking lots. There were energy choke points (what? At certain points your electricity supply hits a threshold, which means you need to add more connections via roads or power lines) I had to manage that caught me off guard. Establishing cargo networks with surrounding towns reminded me of Sims 4. I was hit with this wave of nostalgia. The new industries (coal, stone, wood๊, etc) are ripe for a future DLC, but they already make my cities feel twice as alive and thriving and emphasise how the cities grow and change over time.

The spewing of people from a parking lot at rush hour or the chugging cargo trains roaring on the outskirts of the city are the sort of details that Cities: Skylines always got so close to, but have finally been realized here. There are citizens in the park doing yoga. People take their dogs for a walk. At nighttime, the city is quiet, and the light❀s go on in the tower blocks. While the fabric of Cities: Skylines is still here, Colossal Order has managed to reimagine an old formula—it has, with much tinkering and twiddling, managed to make one of the best ever city builders, better.

Cities Skylines 2 winter town multiple apartment buildings with grey roofs, distant mountains with snow on

I’ve enjoyed my time a lot with Cities: Skylines 2, but it’s not a perfect game. It can’t be a perfect game, because it’s missing far too many features from its predecessor. I can’t build custom parks or airports, I can’t use the plethora of quality of life mods (a line tool for placing props would be amazing, CO, please), and it’s missing far too many assets to construct the sort of intricate cities you could build in the first game. However, it will be a perfect game in a few years. That’s just the nature of the way Paradox likes to do things. It’s the Paradox paradox: buy a game now, play the full thing in three years time if you pay a bit more money. People will feel di🌳fferently about this, and I do believe that Cities: Skylines 2 is worth the money you’ll pay for it right now—but you should know that this isn’t a fully-fleshed out beast like the older game. I’d love to give it a perfect score, because what is here is fantastic. The game just isn’t quite finished yet.

What Cities: Skylines 2 is, though, is the perfect foundation. Colossal Order h🎉as supported Cities 1 for almost a decade. It’s a game with a thriving community. There’s no doubt in my mind that Cities 2 will receive the same sort of care from its dev team. Patches, DLC, content packs, better (maybe?) mod suppꦍort. It’ll all arrive at some point. It’s just not here yet. The game isn’t unfinished, it’s just unpolished, unhoned, unrefined. It’s still a gem, though.