Cities: Skylines 2 Reviews
Cities: Skylines 2 is an ambitious sequel that might have bitten off more than it can chew – be prepared to do a lot of terraforming if you don't want your metropolis to look like a nightmare.
The city builder sequel is packed with big improvements but a fair share of disappointments.
It's going to take a lot of improvement to get this sim into an acceptable form
Quantifying the nuance of Cities: Skylines II isn’t easy. As I dig deeper into its complicated systems, more and more exciting features are still coming into focus. The sequel is ambitious and wants players to juggle hundreds of considerations as they build towards Elysium, and it delivers in that aspect. Yet, unfortunately, the game’s consistent technical problems tend to mire that calculated success.
Skylines 2 appears to be the distinct result of a dev team looking out at other places to find beauty and, more importantly, designing with an aim toward getting players interested in thinking of themselves as people making aesthetic choices. It’s thrilling.
Cities: Skylines 2 has a bright future ahead of it. The core city building is solid, a well-rounded new take on the city building genre that already covers a lot of bases, but has plenty of room for expansion and further ideas to come through to it. Sure, you might miss the creature comforts of old DLC and mods, but given time Cities: Skylines 2 will be a bigger and better city builder.
City Skylines 2 is a great city management and creation game, with a bright future ahead thanks to updates, mods and user-created content, which already has a range of interesting options, although the whole is weighed down by poor optimization that still has a little way to go to unfold its full potential.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
There’s still work to be done, but Cities Skylines 2 is an impressive improvement over the original. Its systems work together seamlessly, and you have more control over how your city develops without it feeling overwhelming or intimidating.
This is an excellent sequel, and an exciting foundation for what I’m sure will be a bright, addition-packed future.
A good sequel which provides a better interface and lots of freedom for building your own cities. Too bad the game lacks in modes and optimization.
Review in Italian | Read full review
In many ways, Cities Skylines 2 is addictive, but the word 'addictive' should be taken subjectively. The game has good addictive potential, like the runner's high after intense exercise or a delicious cup of coffee. But it also has bad addictive potential, like a narcotic, as you grind through the performance issues because you know it'll get good again soon, and you know your rig can totally handle it, as you promise to your friends.
While it does struggle under the weight of its own ambition a little, Cities: Skylines II is still a super addictive city sim.
Cities Skylines 2 is a well-loved home that picks smart renovation over a sweeping revolution. With incredible visuals and immaculate detailing, few cities can eclipse this colossal effort in terms of sheer freedom and choice.
An engaging zone-based city builder that balances simulation with ease of play, but offers little that feels substantially new or improved enough to warrant a sequel.
Suffice it to say I’m excited for this game, and so much of me wants to recommend every bit of it. Right now, the performance issues make that very, very hard. I’m not sure why Colossal and Paradox didn’t delay all of it until 2024 instead of just consoles, but here we are. Much like other games that launched in a rough state, I’m certain that Cities: Skylines II will eventually be something to behold. For now, however, there’s a bit of buyer beware.
Even with some of its shortcomings, Cities: Skylines 2 delivers an extremely deep and content-rich city simulator that genre fans will definitely want to check out. It should once again remind fans why Colossal Order is the perfect studio to lead the urban city-building genre after the failings of the SimCity franchise. However, it is also hard to look past the fact that this game is launching with less content than the original game currently has. Couple that with the limitations the districts have and the lack of the custom-building tools that players loved in the original, and the game feels like it is being held back a bit at launch. Much of this may be fixed with post-launch updates, but right now, it feels like a pretty glaring omission.
Cities: Skylines 2 is a very good city builder with a few marked improvements over its predecessor and is huge in scale. It is, however, let down in (arguably unfair) comparison with the original due to the countless free content (and paid DLC) that went into that, making this feel comparatively light.
Maybe it isn’t fair to compare Cities: Skylines II to its predecessor, which has had years of updates and addons. Setting aside some technical issues, Cities: Skylines II has some interesting new systems, some welcome mechanical improvements, and lots of potential. But it’s missing some content that long time players have probably come to expect, and it’s in need of optimization, bug fixes, and the sense of life and fun that characterized the first game.
Cities: Skyline II expands, refines, simplifies and complicates where necessary the legacy of the first chapter, but right now it is above all a vision. It is the vision of what could be after the dev patches for technical problems and the community mods to increase the content, the two premises on which the foundations of a fortune rest that, hopefully, will accompany the days and nights for a long time of a large group of city builder fans.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Cities: Skylines II is a gripping experience and a perfect follow-up to the first game. Sadly, all of that is really dragged down by myriads of technical problems. For now, we can only hope that Colossal Order will fix most of the issue and gets the game to the state it deserves to be.
Review in Russian | Read full review