Cities: Skylines 2 is a terrific city builder with incredible quality-of-life features, an excellent underlying simulation, and a fantastic set of tools to let you create the city of your dreams.
It also launches in one of the worst technical situations I’ve ever seen from a big video game on any platform, with a slew of technical and performance concerns that overwhelm almost everything else. This could be the best city-building game ever developed someday, but that moment is not now.
Cities: Skylines 2 is, for all practical purposes, an early access game – an in-development product that you should only invest in if you’re patient and optimistic enough to wait for it to improve over time.
Developer Colossal Order has admitted that this launch is inadequate and has promised further enhancements in the future, but it will take a lot of work to get this sim into an acceptable state.
When Cities: Skylines 2 sings, it truly sings. The game accurately simulates every citizen’s existence, and watching how individual choices affect everything from traffic density to economic growth gives everything a fantastic sense of life. The new construction tools are better than ever, reducing the monotony of putting out highways and huge residential zones.
Road Work Ahead
Skylines in Cities The building tools in 2 are so fantastic that they even got me to be creative against my best efforts. I played city builders for the management simulation rather than the opportunity to create aesthetically attractive metropolises. Yet, within a few hours of making my first city, I had gorgeous tiny communities, each with its personality.
Because of the ease with which I could create curving streets and construct around topographical oddities, I ended up automatically producing the kinds of strange minor diversions that give actual towns their personalities. The scale of the maps also helps with this, as it quietly encourages you to build a metropolis realistically.
Because industry requires access to shipping in order to thrive, I’ve created this waterfront industrial park that connects to my harbor and railyard. The original group of residential and commercial zones I built quickly became a dense urban center that serves as the beating heart of my city. As more residents continue to want to move in, I continue to build massive, simplified road grids on the outskirts of town to support an increasingly unwieldy suburban sprawl.
It’s not even difficult to keep your infrastructure upgraded to meet the needs of your city’s growth. It is simple to replace highways with higher-capacity alternatives and minor improvements barely expand the footprint of those roadways.
When it becomes necessary to convert, for example, a two-lane street into a six-lane thoroughfare, the relevant buildings are automatically bulldozed to make room, and possible zoning zones are quickly rezoned to accommodate the new road plan. More significant city service buildings include a universal ‘ Relocation’ button that allows you to transfer them anywhere at any time for a minimal charge.
Going back through old neighborhoods to update and perfect them can be the most time-consuming aspect of a city builder, but it’s also one of the most enjoyable parts of Cities: Skylines 2.
It was pretty enjoyable going back over early sections that I’d quickly slapped together, playing with the architecture to get it just perfect – I even found myself having a fun time modifying the genre’s biggest bugbear: highway networks. Cities: Skylines 2 managed to make me appreciate the process of extending a cloverleaf interchange, which is a true marvel.
From Village To Megalopolis
While Cities: Skylines 2 will never be able to compete with the original game and all of its DLC in terms of the sheer volume of available content at launch, the sequel is far from lacking. There are several possibilities to help increase, for example, your police or fire coverage, as well as more sorts of roadways than I could ever believe exist.
It is an RPG-style progression system in which you level up as your city grows and spend what are essentially skill points to unlock new building options, and while I’m generally of the ‘not everything has to be an RPG’ camp, this is a brilliant addition to help introduce you to all those building options without making them too overwhelming. (If the material drip-feed irritates you, you can check a box to unlock everything when you begin a new city.)
Cities: Skylines 2 has lots of clever small elements that help make things readable. The familiar overlays for things like traffic density or pollution levels are as bright as ever. Still, new and enlarged information like the updated Chirper feed is even better at letting you keep a pulse on your city.
Chirper still offers you a Twitter-style feed showcasing your residents’ feelings. Still, it’s now much more often updated, and the number of likes a post receives indicates how strongly it affects your citizens’ well-being. I thought this faux social media feed to be a novelty. Still, it’s actually useful for discovering issues that are troubling your citizens in ways that other types of information panels could miss.
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Expect Heavy Congestion
Cities: Skylines 2 was played on a PC powered by an i9 9900k and an RTX 3080, a rig capable of delivering decent performance in even the most technically demanding games. Nonetheless, I found myself needing to reduce the settings not just to medium or low but to very low in order to achieve frame rates above 30 frames per second consistently.
Forget the ‘Can it run Crysis?’ cliche; PC gamers are going to adopt ‘Can it run Cities: Skylines 2?’ as the new standard for top-tier gaming performance.
The overall poor performance of Cities: Skylines 2 is shocking. Given how powerful the underlying simulation is, a significant amount of CPU demand is to be expected, but Skylines 2 is also shockingly taxing on your graphics card despite a straightforward visual design.
I’m not sure what the underlying technical limits are that cause this kind of issue, but it seems horrible when a game like this is straining my system harder than, say, Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing.
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