A Solid Foundation, but Needs (a lot of) Work

Cities: Skylines 2 has a lot of potential, but it feels like an unfinished product. The graphics are a definite improvement over the first game, with detailed buildings, realistic lighting and impressive weather effects. However, the core simulation leaves much to be desired. Traffic AI behaves erratically, city management lacks depth and the game often struggles with performance issues.

One of the biggest downsides is stability -> frequent crashes make it frustrating to play for long sessions. While I appreciate the ambition behind the game, it currently feels more like an early-access title rather than a polished sequel.

If the developers continue improving the simulation and fixing stability issues, this could become a really good city-building experience. Until then, it’s hard to recommend it.

⭐ 6/10 (for now)

I would suggest to play City Skylines instead until then

I hate the way that it lags, the way that it stutters, I hate the way that it plays

I hate the game, I always need to actually push myself just to start the game and then closed it after the pop up launcher showed up.

I was excited to jump into Cities: Skylines II after hours playing cities skyline 1 on steam and my PS4, expecting an improved city-building experience, the ability to build off service buildings, the seasons, and better option at building road (overall yes, more mechanism than CS 1) what I got was a game that runs like a broken-down Porsche Mauser tank.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Cities: Skylines II is horribly optimized. The fact that they list an RTX 3080 as the recommended GPU is ridiculous, frame rates are inconsistent, stuttering is constant, and performance tanks as your city grows. It’s frustrating when a game that should be about creativity and smooth management ends up feeling like an endurance test for your PC/laptop.

I was never asking for ultra-realistic, almost dull graphics. The original Cities: Skylines had a clean, semi-stylized look that made cities feel vibrant and inviting. Cities: Skylines II, on the other hand, leans too hard into realism, making everything look too muted and uninspiring. The lighting feels off, textures look muddy despite the “improvements,” and overall, it lacks the charm of the first game.

hard to enjoy when it runs so poorly, I really like CS1 the way the semi-stylized look....even though the animations were simpler, they had a certain charm that made the city feel alive. I like to see a dog turns into a car, I like to see thousand of people summoning their own car or bike after leaving stadium with angry after their team losing. It kills the immersion rather than enhancing it.

I find myself wanting to go back to Cities: Skylines 1, that's still something that CS 2 can't replicate even after 1 year, 3 months, and 23 days after release.

It's a game that has everything… except for what should work from the very beginning. Without mods, it's like building a city with Lego blocks, but without the instructions – you’re doing something, but soon it all falls apart. Traffic chaos? Definitely. Unhappy citizens? Of course! Overall, I recommend this game, but without mods, it’s pretty weak.

Like the first part, Cities: Skylines 2 is a city-building game in which the primary challenges are those that the player sets for themselves. Instead of specific goals (unless we consider expanding the metropolis and avoiding the threat of bankruptcy as such), we get a virtual sandbox in which we can do anything that comes to our mind, limited only by our imagination. The basic task set for us during the game is to make the city we create... aesthetic.

To achieve this, players have at their disposal a number of tools that allow not only building itself, but also modifying the terrain on which we materialize the agglomeration of our dreams step by step. Thanks to this, even if we are not very satisfied with any of the boards provided by the developers at the start, with a little effort we can improve them to our own taste. We have almost divine power over the map and what appears on it - theoretically, you have to pay attention not to exceed the allocated budget, but in practice this does not limit us too much in our actions, when with a few clicks we create completely new hills or lowlands.

Every now and then it turns out that it is necessary to demolish previously erected objects and replace them with others in order to improve the functioning of the city - so as you can see, the duties never end and it is often necessary to change our plans regarding the direction in which we want to lead the agglomeration we manage.

We will also find minor novelties in the tools themselves used practically at every step - whether for marking roads or creating specialized industrial zones, allowing additional levels of complexity when building specific districts. The most important thing, however, is that the system responsible for city traffic has been improved, which in the previous part, to put it mildly, left much to be desired.
Now, we can finally breathe a sigh of relief, seeing that it is no longer required to be a qualified specialist in building roundabouts, bypasses and motorways to allow citizens to move around the streets, which has been helped by the improvement of the artificial intelligence of the citizens.

However, those who expect a revolution from Cities: Skylines 2 may feel disappointed - instead, we get an evolution focused on general improvement of many elements already available in the first one, but none to the extent that an obvious improvement in quality can be seen immediately. On the one hand, it is good that the creators did not try to reinvent the wheel or fix what is not broken, but at the same time it is hard to shake the feeling that after so many years of waiting for a new title, it should offer more novelties.

Pros.
+a wealth of possibilities when developing the city
+boards larger than ever before
+various improvements compared to the first part
+a clear and transparent interface, allowing for easy finding everything you need
improved functioning of city traffic, preventing constant traffic jams

Cons.
-tutorials leave something to be desired
-poor optimization, causing even powerful machines to start choking
-the level of visual setting does not justify the high hardware requirements

Overall.
Cities: Skylines 2 is an example of a production whose creators have taken a step forward, but a step short enough to make us wonder whether it is really worth investing in their new work now. Of course, it must be borne in mind that the game by the Colossal Order studio will certainly be developed for years to come, and each subsequent add-on will significantly enrich our experience with new systems of interaction with the managed city, but probably no one expected anything else, especially since the publisher is Paradox Interactive, known for its love of selling DLC. For a fan of city builders, this will be a must-have item sooner or later.
6.5/10

Most poorly optimized game ever since launch. Even running it on a high-quality system, the game is constantly subjected to crashes. I deleted for a few months and then tried to play again recently to see if it was better, still crashes after like 10 mins of play ALL THE ♥♥♥ TIME

Sigh. What could have been.

What a real let down of a game especially compared to the original Cities game. 16 months this game has been out and buggy, yes, but i could get by. Lack of diversity in architecture, services, etc, fine, I could get by. Specialized industry all looking exactly the same, alright, but I could get by. Unappealing color palettes and overall muted/flat game coloring, meh, but i could still get by. Putting 37 hours into a city only for it to be deleted by the game, unacceptable. Everything wiped as if i never played the game but i have the achievements. What is the point of playing any game if your save data just disappears. I have hundreds of hrs on the xbox version of Cities, multiple cities going back years, never one issue. The base game is great even without all the add-ons, and once you did get the add-ons, it accentuated the game. I still go back to the original Cities and am amazed by all that I have created. It is truly a game to lost in for days. This new version clearly lost me in 37 hrs and whatever add-ons are available, are there to make the game playable.

It bricked my windows explorer. Now I’m bricked too.

It still crashes! Great design features... easy to look at... cool perks... but it crashes! Just spent 45 minutes on some cool little additions to my city only for them to be gone with a crash out of nowhere.

It's always hard to judge games that are clearly unfinished. Sometimes, despite the flaws, the experience feels so complete – and the fixes seem easy to fix – that you can forgive the occasional glitch. In other games, identical glitches can ruin the entire experience for some reason. Part of this is probably because the original Cities: Skylines is remembered for its serenity: when you notice problems here and there in the sequel, it's so much harder to get to the same zen state.

Fortunately, the most important element of Cities: Skylines works just as well as before.
Cities: Skylines 2 is a well-designed game, and mostly well-made. This is not exactly surprising, because Skylines 2 is close to the excellent previous installment. The mechanics that have been revamped have also been mostly revamped for the better. As it stands, the game experience still feels limited: not only is there less content than in the expanded Cities: Skylines with its numerous additional content packs, but the content that is available in the game has been tweaked in one way or another.

Skylines 2 is not a difficult game: practically anyone can build a functioning city, as long as they have the patience to build moderately and hone their tax rates. However, that doesn't mean that playing is necessarily fun. In the previous Cities: Skylines, I managed even half-accidentally, as long as I designed at least a few productive buildings for the city. This time I had to pat myself and my broader ideas on the back, because the creation of productive infrastructure and the filling of the city with residents was so slow that I constantly felt like I was building myself to the point of bankruptcy. Skylines 2 also seems to focus more on budgeting and micromanaging the city, which is not my thing at all. Accountants who enjoy working with Excel spreadsheets may disagree.

Despite the possible superficiality of the simulation, the city can look pretty – but only when it has grown properly: there are certain buildings in the game – such as school buildings and the train station – that are comparatively so large that the detached houses, terraced houses and small shops of the newly founded small town look like a shanty town built around a massive, Kafkaesque bureaucratic palace. Of course, later in the game the detached houses move to the suburbs and the buildings in the city centre increase in size, making the whole look more harmonious. The game does look beautiful from the start. The changing seasons and weather conditions bring a nice variety to the landscapes.

Of course, you don't get much out of a wonderfully designed city unless you also have the time to admire the end result. Skylines 2 has its own camera modes, allowing you to view the metropolis from different angles, but somehow the world felt a bit lifeless. There are plenty of details, but for some reason my city didn't come to life in the same way it used to. Part of this lifeless feeling may also be due to the city simulation. Fans of the game series have investigated, for example on Reddit, how the game's city manages resources in the background, and if the estimates are correct, the in-game production chains don't actually work logically: shops don't need items to sell, and industry doesn't process raw materials in a very realistic way.

The screen refresh rate isn't the only buggy feature. The game stuttered and crashed several times, and I also encountered strange situations: streets wouldn't always connect for some reason I couldn't figure out; the land-building tools are so sensitive that they're almost unusable; buildings occasionally sit on hills at very strange angles, and so on. There are so many small bugs that you can't really relax while playing.

Pros.
+The basic idea of ​​the game still works great.
+The linearization works.

Cons.
-Budgeting and micromanagement.
-Technical impression.
-Feels like an incomplete experience.

Overall.
So far, the sequel just isn't on the same level as the previous one. The game still incorporates a enchanted, exceptionally serene atmosphere: even in spite of the fact that natural disasters happen and city tenants cry for any service at any time,
I immensely enjoyed designing bridges, tunnels, streets and roads.
6/10