Recent reviews by Swusho 🍣

Truly one of the games of all time

Great short horror experience! Really interesting core mechanic with a lot of potential for sure. Love how the dynamic shadows also function as moving cover

Cracked out game, going for that sub 5 baby

I'll start off by saying that the building mechanics of the game are a huge step-up from the first game. I absolutely love the way they've gone about it and it feels genuinely fun and satisfying to build anything free-form, and while there is some jank that's almost a given when you give players any complex system.

I love the game looking at it through the lens of a survival game, but I absolutely can't recommend it in terms of story.

The game heavily boils down to your preferred playstyle. When I originally picked up the game back in EA I treated it like a genuine survival experience and took my time with pretty much everything. I spent around 17 hours getting almost no progress done because I was having that much fun just surviving and building up my base. Although when I recently picked up the game again for it's 1.0 release I quickly found myself unintentionally finishing the game within just 12 hours.

I didn't intend to do so, and I'm in no way a person who enjoys that kind of playstyle, but due to the size of the map I often found it more convenient to just go to the next POI rather than returning all the way back to base. What didn't help is the fact that my base felt basically useless as I had no real incentive to return either. I very quickly found myself with a full inventory and never having to worry about food or water. I visited my base a total of two times, once when I built it and once when I accidentally exited a cave nearby and figured I might as well go back to my base where I ended up spending 1 whole night and then just returning back to what I was previously doing.

The problem with this is the fact that the story was extremely mediocre and felt really thrown together, the cutscenes are just straight up goofy and it's almost impossible to take the story seriously due to them. (As a game developer myself I know animating is hard but they feel almost like they were made and put in last minute, and didn't even have time for polish) The story overall is just extremely shallow, even with the twists they try to throw in. What doesn't help is the fact that both endings are extremely underwhelming and almost felt like an insult to the time I had put in to unraveling the story.

So I ended up spending pretty much my entire playthrough experiencing the mediocre story rather than engaging in the actual fun survival aspects.

To finish off I'd still highly recommend the game, but I'd advise you to just try to take your time and to focus on the survival aspects and view the story as a side-feature.

Runs really well and honestly better than the original for me on my 3070 (50 FPS on high-medium 10k pop). (Don't install on a hard drive, fulls specs below)

Official Paradox Guide for good graphics settings tips: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/tips-our-guide-to-optimize-performance.1603423/

Had a blast playing so far and the graphics look great when compared with the original. The scale of actual buildings and such is a huge improvement from the original. I really enjoy how you actually have to plan around your service buildings now unlike in the original. Definitely pushes me to give more realistic space allocations to various services and zoning types. I think a lot of people forget just how bad the original cities game looked on release and how off the scale was.

Fulls specs:
RAM: 32GB 3200MHz
CPU: Ryzen 7 5700X
GPU: ASUS TUF OC V2 3070
SSD: Samsung 980 NVMe