Cities Skylines 2 - Review Thread - (76/100 OpenCritic)

Game InformationGame Title: Cities: Skylines 2

Platforms:

  • PC (Oct 24, 2023)
  • PlayStation 5 (Oct 24, 2023)
  • Xbox Series X/S (Oct 24, 2023)

Trailer:

Developer: Colossal Order Ltd.

Publisher: Paradox Interactive

Review Aggregator:

OpenCritic - 76 average - 67% recommended - 29 reviews

Critic Reviews**Attack of the Fanboy** - J.R. Waugh - 3.5 / 5

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.

But Why Tho? - Matt Donahue - 9 / 10

Cities Skylines 2 is a worthy successor to the long standing original city builder

CGMagazine - David Walters - 8 / 10

As far as world-building games go, Cities: Skylines II is second to none. The sheer volume of capability is staggering and the possibilities are endless for what you can create.

Checkpoint Gaming - Omi Koulas - 9 / 10

Cities: Skylines II is a city-building experience of epic proportions, filled with complexity and creativity. Its immense ambition in city design is complemented by an intricate web of services and an intelligent population. It may stumble under the weight of technical performance and a few bugs but the series still continues to redefine urban strategy in games. Colossal Order have truly delivered a living, breathing, dynamic city management game.

Game Informer - Sarah Thwaites - 7.5 / 10

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.

GamesRadar+ - Dustin Bailey - 2 / 5

It’s going to take a lot of improvement to get this sim into an acceptable form

God is a Geek - Mick Fraser - 8.5 / 10

While it does struggle under the weight of its own ambition a little, Cities: Skylines II is still a super addictive city sim.

IGN - Leana Hafer - 6 / 10

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.

IGN Italy - Stefano Castelli - Italian - 8 / 10

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.

LadiesGamers.com - Paula Moore - Loved

Cities: Skylines II has much to life up to, and you. know what? This is a fantastic start to a fabulous game. I’m excited for the future of city building. The game will take off once the modders get to work and Colossal Order pushes out the usual updates.

If you buy Cities: Skylines II, you can expect unfamiliarity, familiarity, surprises and the occasional frustration. But once you settle into it, plenty of new gameplay mechanics will keep you on your toes.

I love it, and I can see that Colossal Order love their game, too. I predict Cities: Skylines II will be even more successful than it’s predecessor.

Noisy Pixel - Colin Buchanan - 9 / 10

Despite its few peculiarities and performance issues, Cities: Skylines II successfully upholds the legacy of its predecessor and raises the bar for the city-building genre. Whether you’re a seasoned city planner or a newcomer ready to embark on an urban adventure, Skylines II offers endless possibilities and countless hours of creative enjoyment.

PC Gamer - Christopher Livingston - 77 / 100

The city builder sequel is packed with big improvements but a fair share of disappointments.

PCGamesN - Edward Smith - 7 / 10

Intricate, intuitive, and ambitious, Cities Skylines 2 successfully integrates all the major improvements that players might have wanted. Something personal is lost in its larger scale, while performance problems spoil the beauty, but this could one day become the superior city building game.

Polygon - Cameron Kunzelman - Unscored

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.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - Sin Vega - Unscored

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.

Saving Content - Scott Ellison II - 5 / 5

Colossal Order offers an intricate deep simulation of a city builder. Aside from the taxing performance, it’s simply amazing to see in motion. For the price, you get a metropolis-sized game full of options. It’s also one of those things where I can’t wait to see what this game is like eight years from now. Cities: Skylines II offers the next-generation of the city builder that constantly impressed and amazed.

VG247 - Alex Donaldson - 4 / 5

This is an excellent sequel, and an exciting foundation for what I’m sure will be a bright, addition-packed future.

VideoGamer - Antony Terence - 8 / 10

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.

ArghZombies,

I thought PS5 / XBOX versions were delayed to 2024, no?

caut_R,

Paradox published games are so often great gameplay-wise but technically incompetent lol, wouldn‘t surprise me if it utilized like 2 CPU cores tops to simulate a whole metropolis

Marzepansion,

It’s using unity game engine. I’m a graphics programmer in the industry and at my current and last workplace I made tech for games studios (i.e. I dealt with performance of easily 100 games a year at one point). Unity by far was default the worst to deal with due to the limited tools to fix issues that were inherint to the engine. Note don’t take this as me saying unity is a bad engine, it’s just that it isn’t a performant one. Its focus is elsewhere (accessibility and ease of development, things it excels at).

So yes, you can definitely assume that, in fact I’d assume one core for the simulation unless they wrote an entire new architecture to replace unity’s functionality (you’d still be locked to single thread sync points, but that’s manageable). It’s a hassle most don’t deal with as it’s a lot of work to struggle against writing code like unity wants you to write it.

I worked in a studio that exactly did that a decade ago, and it was painful and frankly a huge upfront dev cost that takes a long time to pay off.

sychthys, (edited )

Sklylines 1 was on Unity, but Skylines 2 is using Unreal as its engine this time.

I stand corrected. Must have been confused by the tech demo and hearing about “the new engine” from some CS content creators and making assumptions. It is indeed made in Unity, which is a shame. I used to love that engine, but it really hasn’t kept up with the times. I was so excited for it being in UE5.

MrScottyTay,

I’m pretty sure it’s still unity. The original announcement trailer was rendered using unreal though.

Marzepansion,

Nope, the announcement trailer was made in Unreal, they’ve confirmed it’s in Unity.

Here’s their official twitter account confirming that: twitter.com/colossalorder/…/1633060715132080130

Paradox,
@Paradox@lemdro.id avatar

I really hope its good. From the YT videos I’ve seen of people who got it early, it looks great.

But I still have a little bit of hesitation about how the roads continue to work. They’re still mostly “plop a road of X type”, and upgrades you just either connect in, or plop on top of an existing road. Finessing lane changes, i.e. merges or adding a new lane, still looks to be mostly an issue of getting the game to do what you want. If you sat me down and asked me to do a fun game based way of drawing road and other networks, I’d probably go with something loosely similar to how OpenStreetMap represents roads, but with more graphical flair. Roads are just collections of points, in whats called a “way.” You can set attributes on a way, which are things such as lanes, speed, lighting, material, etc. For a game, you could basically draw a line of where you want the road, and then set how many lanes it is, and see that footprint, before you apply it. Also lets you do things like take a 5 lane road and split it up into a big mess, so you can make abominations like the hi-5 in Texas, or even things as simple as diverging diamond or SPUI. Not sure if thats possible in CS2, I haven’t seen any youtubers do it. Getting them working in CS1 was possible, but required a ton of mods.

Maybe I’m overthinking it, and maybe the CS2 approach is better. I’ll have to get my hands on it to try it.

As for zoning, its okay, but I wish we’d really start to see some divorce from what SimCity invented back in 1989, and allow for more granular mixed-use zoning. I want apartment buildings that have light commercial at the ground floor, like you see in basically every major city

Also really hoping that it has proper M+KB on xbox. Starfield doesn’t, and it leaves whole sections of the game essentially broking (i.e. crafting 99 items requires you to press RB a shitload)

kayrae_42,

I’m running a slightly older computer, that I need to upgrade my memory and graphics card on. The only reason I am going to try this when it comes out and not just keep playing City Skylines 1 is that it is a day one release on Game Pass. I’m not sure with the performance issues my computer will handle it and I haven’t really seen much conversation about specs required, so I’m concerned. My system was mid tier 4 years ago so if it is running bad on high tier systems today…

spicytuna62,
@spicytuna62@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve got an RTX 4070 and a 4790K. I’m fully prepared for my CPU to have a really hard time keeping up. I think an upgrade will be coming early next year.

This is just a game I’m really really really excited about.

kayrae_42,

I definitely am going to upgrade, I want their new life sim which they pushed the early release date back on. So I have been saving to do that. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to have everything in time for the release of this game. Hopefully the bugs will be worked out by the time I’m finished. I’m hoping by the summer.

Thassodar,

Keep me in mind if you’re looking to sell that 4070 in the future. I’m still running a 2070.

spicytuna62,
@spicytuna62@lemmy.world avatar

Well, it replaced an R9 290 so you might be waiting a while for me to get in touch lmao

sheogorath,

They’re releasing this game as an early access. The Day One Game Pass release evidenced this, they wanted as many people as possible running this game to beta test this game.

Why not just release the game as an early access you say? If you release the game as early access there would be much less people buying and installing the game compared to a “full release” and we need the line going up for the Q4 so that our corporate overlords can buy another ranch at New Zealand my friend.

Miclux,

9/10 what a joke. The same people giving 10/10 to cyberpunk…

WarmSoda,

I wonder how many people reviewing the game even played the first one.

Also, seeing comments in reviews about how it’s ‘a good start’ make me sad about the state of the game industry, and how people are so willing to accept it.

Rentlar,

Idk, having delivered on what the game purported to be in the trailer is nice imo. Due to the ambition and relatively short window between announcement and release, delaying it to resolve performance issues on PCs would have heightened expectations further than what would have been developed for it.

Performance issues I know are game breaking for many gamers and I can respect that. To me, it’s one negative within many positives. My 50k cities in CS:1 are a lagfest anyway.

chunkystyles,

I thought I was going to play this game day one. The performance issues are going to keep me away until they’re fixed at least somewhat. I’m happy to hear that’s the only complaint reviewers have.

weeahnn,
@weeahnn@lemmy.world avatar

That does seem to be a big hurdle for a lot of games these days. It comes out, the performance is bad so not as many people are able to enjoy it. I just hope that CO quickly fixes any performance issues the game might have.

chunkystyles,

I hope so, too. I am unbelievably hyped for this game. It really seems like they fixed everything that detracted from the first game. Mainly the awful traffic “AI”.

sheogorath,

I just experienced this while playing Diablo 4. In the pre-season I routinely got ~120 FPS on my graphical settings and tried out the game again after season 2 release and my FPS shot up to 350.

Will_WMGC,

I think what the game’s like right now won’t matter as much as what it’ll become. I don’t think CO need to do a ton to make it as good if not better than the first game. Really excited for it, personally!

Leyths,

Yeah agreed. I’ve been following along with a lot of the influencer videos over the last few weeks and whilst the performance seems choppy, the base game looks like a really solid improvement over CS1

I’ve been encouraged by the acknowledgment of the poor performance by the devs and letting the embargo lift relatively early. If people want to wait for a few performance patches before buying I think that’s really fair- but personally I’m looking forward to messing around with it on release.

simple,

It’s pretty much par for the course for Paradox games to have a sequel that isn’t as fleshed out but has a bright future. I’d still wait a few years to pick it up with DLCs.

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