Cities: Skylines 2
If you can dream it, you can build it
Raise a city from the ground up and transform it into the thriving metropolis only you can imagine. You’ve never experienced building on this scale. With deep simulation and a living economy, Cities: Skylines II delivers world-building without limits.
Lay the foundations for your city to begin. Create the roads, infrastructure, and systems that make life possible day to day. It’s up to you – all of it.
How your city grows is your call too, but plan strategically. Every decision has an impact. Can you energize local industries while also using trade to boost the economy? What will make residential districts flourish without killing the buzz downtown? How will you meet the needs and desires of citizens while balancing the city’s budget?
Your city never rests. Like any living, breathing world, it changes over time. Some changes will be slow and gradual, while others will be sudden and unexpected. So while seasons turn and night follows day, be ready to act when life doesn’t go to plan.
An ever-expanding community of Builders means more opportunities to build a truly groundbreaking city with mods. They’re now more easily available in Cities: Skylines II.
The most realistic and detailed city builder ever, Cities: Skylines II pushes your creativity and problem-solving to another level. With beautifully rendered high-resolution graphics, it also inspires you to build the city of your dreams.
Deep simulation
AI and intricate economics mean your choices ripple through the fabric of the city. Remember that as you strategize, problem-solve, and react to change, challenges, and opportunities.
Epic scale, endless possibilities
Cities: Skylines II lets you create without compromise. Now you can build sky-high and sprawl across the map like never before. Why not? Your city is you.
Cities that come alive
Your decisions shape each citizen’s life path, a chain of events that defines who they are. From love and loss to wealth and wellbeing, follow their life’s ups and downs.
A dynamic world
Pick a map to set the climate of your city. These are the natural forces you’ll negotiate to expand your city amid rising pollution, changeable weather, and seasonal challenges.
Steam User 278
If you've never played a Cities game play CS1, then with DLC, then with mods first. Come to this if you're a fan of that and want a graphical update, economy, and gameplay change. However, despite this CS1 will always be better for a long time. That is solely because of the amount of time updates, DLC, and mods have flooded into the community.
Each fix of CS2 is a step towards the right direction but it doesn't overshadow the fact that the launch was very disappointing. It should never be standard in the industry.
Performance and stability has improved since launch for me. Pretty playable and the essential mods from CS1 are here.
It's also a very pretty game but CS2 is not without its flaws including some occasional crashes. Consistent updates will help but buyers beware. This game is a slow burn towards what it can become.
Overall I would say this is a cautiously positive 6/10
Steam User 277
Just finished playing 99 hours and I love this game. This is my FIRST computer game (I'm old) and I'm truly enjoying my time in Cities Skylines II and looking forward to what will be offered next.
Steam User 299
Colossal Order please re watch your own promotion video from 5 years ago by Justin Roczniak/donoteat01 and listen to what he says. That's what a good city simulation needs to be able to do, on top of being a good looking city painter.
Its a start but still has some odd design. I think the worst part is somehow its more sterile and overly clean felling than the first game. Shame on Paradox for pushing this out the door long before it was ready. Making hardware requirements this high end was a fundamental misread of your audience. City builders are traditionally played on mid range systems and laptops and by people who often don't prioritize cutting edge first person shooter/ action game graphics.
Steam User 134
This game still lacks a lot of of basic things and feels unfinished. But I have to admit, I haven't played CS1 since I got this game. Overall, I like it.
Steam User 157
Let me start by saying I have almost 2K hours on this game and had many more on CS1. I will choose this over CS1 everytime. After using the road and infrastructure tools in this game, I can no longer go back unfortunately. Also the graphics on this game are amazing.
With that said, I heavily modded CS1 as well as CS2 and probably would not play as much without mods. Here is my take so far with this game:
1. Change the Camera Settings - the default settings are not optimized and I hate the motion blur, changing these will make it look so much better and keep your game running well if you don't have the fastest PC
2. Use a few necessary mods to fix functional bugs which still remain and/or ones to make building easier or better looking, my favorites:
- Move It
- Traffic Lanes Mod
- Find it (better then developement mode)
- Many other surfaces/RICO type assets
3. Play sandbox with unlimited money and unlocked assets or Easy mode as the Normal mode seems to bug a bit on Economy for some reason - hope this will be fixed soon. If you are struggling getting going, I have found that using the Geothermal Energy plant over groundwater is a huge export of Energy and Money and will help you early on if you are struggling to balance your budget.
4. As you start building constantly check different popular mods as you will find there may be some aspect missing and mods will fill that hole
As for what I would like to see in upcoming updates:
- I want the economy issues to be ironed out as sandbox is fun but having to balance a budget is also a huge favorite of mine in these simulation games
- I have found that the cities (although mugh nicer looking) dont have the same energy and life to them with people using our assets as we saw with CS1
- Stadiums and Sports Arenas need to be more like CS1 where there was a game scheduled and this creates traffic to that arena with people coming to the game and/or leaving the game
- We need bikes as this is a huge part of infrastructure (bike lanes) in almost any city and am wondering why this is missing
Overall I have seriously been enjoying this game (hence 2k hrs) but there is still so much opportunity for this to be an even more amazing game. I really hope they continue to improve it and that people stop hating on it so much.
Steam User 102
This is a complicated review for me to write as a prolific city builder player since I could use a computer.
The PROS of CS2:
- The roadbuilding and other infrastructure tools are top-notch and easily the best in any city builder. Certain mods make it even better, like lane direction tool.
- The mod library is growing weekly and it is making the experience better.
- If you have a half-way decent PC, this game is technically better than CS1. Graphics, sounds, simulation, etc... and you can grow larger cities per amount of PC horsepower used... CS1 came out in the quad-core CPU era, and this game is in the 6 - 8 core mainstream PC era and if you have those resources, this game will use all of it.
- The simulation is more in-depth than CS1, but it is half-baked because Colossal/Paradox needed more development time for this game. There are a lot of nuanced characteristics which dictate how citizens own houses in the game, for example, but Colossal/Paradox are always tweaking those variables in each patch because of how unprepared it was.
The CONS of CS2:
- This game needed easily another year of development time. Like I mentioned, the simulation has more variables to it, but they weren't properly implemented. Each patch tweaks these variables to make the game better, but the devs are kinda playing a game of whack-a-mole because each change they make has cascading effects.
- If you have a low-end PC, don't bother running the game. Like I stated in the PROS section, if your PC has some oomph behind it, you can and will be able to build BIG. If you're on a PC from the CS1 era - quad core, GTX 1060, 16GB RAM era, this game will run like poop. The game picks up very well when you give it a Ryzen 2000+ 8-core CPU (or Intel 9700k 8-core CPU), 32GB RAM and an RTX 3060/6700 XT or better GPU. I run this game on a Ryzen 6900HS/RTX 3070 Ti/32GB RAM laptop and it's pretty good.
- The specialized industries are half-baked at the moment. They were a DLC in CS1. They come with the base game here. The devs needed more time to flesh this aspect of the game out properly.
- Most of the statistics the game shows you are nebulous and inconsistent. This is because of all the tweaks they make in each patch, and what the devs decide to present to you. You can't really trust them and instead should use common sense and classic querying/watching/observing to get an idea for how your city is flowing. If you go based on what the game's stats tell you, you'll run out of money pretty quick.
TL;DR:
Technically better than CS1. Needed another year of development time to actually be better than CS1.
I recommend and don't recommend it at the same time.
Steam User 93
Well, the game is certainly in a better state than it began in. It doesn't crash every other minute. So in that sense, the devs are certainly making progress in calling this a finished product.
We're still awaiting many critical features that the first game had. Namely traffic light interval controls. So, I guess until we get that, just avoid using traffic lights all together because they almost always make traffic worse lol.
I'm giving this a thumbs up because it truly IS improving with each update. And although I don't like this recent recurring game dev strategy of releasing games way too early, as long as it they do eventually finish the game, then I'm happy. I just won't purchase the game until it reaches that state. Which is what I recommend doing with this game.