Cities Skylines Ii -

Hereâ€™s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines II as of its launch window and early updates. When Cities: Skylines launched in 2015, it resurrected the city-builder genre from a long SimCity slumber. Nearly a decade later, Colossal Order returns with a sequel promising true next-gen urban simulation. No more fake traffic, no more city size limits, no more agent limits. Cities: Skylines II aims for the starsâ€”but arrives with engine trouble. The Good: A Living, Breathing Metropolis Scale and Seamlessness The first game felt like a collection of tiles. Here, you unlock tiles gradually, but the potential map is enormousâ€”over 150 square kilometers. You can build a farming outpost, a distant airport, and a downtown core without a single loading screen. More importantly, the city feels contiguous. Citizens donâ€™t despawn; they commute, get stuck, find alternate routes, and even move if their commute is too long. That alone changes everything.

The road tools are a delight. Parallel roads, asymmetrical lanes, roundabouts, traffic lights, stop signs, lane connectorsâ€”you can micro-manage every intersection. Traffic AI is smarter: vehicles change lanes earlier, use slip lanes, and actually obey lane arrows. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange without downloading 17 mods. Cities Skylines II

In two years, with mods, DLC, and performance fixes, this could be a 9.5/10 masterpiece. Today, itâ€™s an ambitious, frustrating, deeply promising foundation. Buy it if you want to build the foundation now . Wait if you want to live in the finished house. Hereâ€™s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines

Itâ€™s a brilliant simulation buried under technical debt. When everything worksâ€”when you watch raw ore travel by train to a smelter, then to a parts factory, then to a tool shop, then to a hardware store, and a citizen buys a hammer to upgrade their homeâ€” Cities: Skylines II is unmatched. But too often, youâ€™re fighting performance, missing features, or unclear feedback loops. No more fake traffic, no more city size

Snow isnâ€™t cosmetic. Snowplows become a service; road maintenance matters. Leaf cleanup in autumn, heatwaves increasing electricity demand, thunderstorms causing localized floodingâ€”the environment pushes back in fair, interesting ways.

The economy simulation is deep, but the game does a poor job explaining it. Why is your industry failing? Maybe raw materials arenâ€™t reaching them. Maybe too many workers are commuting elsewhere. Maybe a cargo train station is overloaded. The game gives charts and graphs, but not the intuitive alerts of, say, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic . Youâ€™ll spend time guessing. The Bad: Missing Features & Rough Edges Modding Support â€“ â€œLaterâ€ Cities: Skylines lived and breathed on mods. The sequel promised native Paradox Mods integration, but at launch, modding tools (asset editor, map editor, code modding) were absent. Months later, theyâ€™ve partially arrived, but itâ€™s nowhere near Steam Workshopâ€™s ecosystem. For a game built on â€œmodders will fix it,â€ launching without modding is a major wound.

Day one lacked: proper European/Vanilla style variations for all zones (only North American and European were available, and even those were incomplete), in-game tutorials for complex systems (geothermal power? international connections?), and even basic photo mode. Patches have added some, but the launch felt six months early.