6 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 132.0 hrs on record (39.2 hrs at review time)
Posted: 15 Nov, 2023 @ 3:37am

The game is fun to play, but no where near as replayable as modded C:S 1.
First off, the performance. I have a machine with i9 10850k, 32gb ram and rx 6700 xt, running Linux. It runs fine, but around 150k population the frames start dropping significantly.

It has many bugs/annoyances, including:
- Bus lanes do nothing, cars just drive on them
- Garbage is broken - incinerator generates garbage, export for free
- Ambulance broken (still have plenty ambulances left not sent out, but people are complaining about no ambulance)
- Trams constantly get stuck at stops and the general routing of public transport is terrible. I have to constantly fight with the game to get them to stop switching tracks for no reason.
- The modular additions to buildings look like they're supposed to be placed roadside, but you can't do that.
- Traffic AI.... from cars freezing, changing lanes last second, or even driving around in pedestrian zones, it's annoying to work with.
- The specialised industry can only be 'zoned' in a weird circle for some reason, it's really small also so you end up placing a lot of these buildings.
- Like in C:S 1, there is some kind of agent limit so when you have a high population traffic just disappears.

There are also features that really aren't well thought out:
- Can only tax citizens based on their education level.
- Parking... most buildings don't have any underground parking in them, and the parking buildings that you can place have way too little spaces for their big footprint. The cars get stuck because they enter a full parking lot and exit all of the time causing extreme traffic backups that you can do nothing about, because roadside buildings driveways cannot be treated as separate roads, so you can't have a left turn lane to a parking lot or bus station for example.
- Accidents.. they are cool but the actual safety of your roads doesn't seem to matter, correct me if i'm wrong, but they seem to happen just as often on safe intersections as on sphagetti monster junctions I build.

And things that are disappointingly missing:
- Industry is still chimney-filled polluting buildings. No light industry, or at least cannot choose to zone solely light industry.
- Traffic management - you cannot manually set lanes, change traffic light sequence, or anything of that sort. It's hard to manage traffic in this game. You cannot even give a road priority!
- The Cities lack any animations, they feel way less lively than those in C:S 1 that have kids playing in playgrounds, police arresting people or football being played in a stadium.

But the biggest problem - no uniqueness. Every city feels the same, as you really cannot unleash your creativity. There is much, much less variety than in C:S 1 and I assume this will come with time, but for now it's a huge disappointment. Some examples of this:

- They added modularity to buildings but removed all the modular ideas from C:S 1 - now you cannot create Park zones, airport zones etc and be creative - you just can add some existing modular addons to these buildings. With parks you cannot even upgrade them, which is a huge step down from what we had in C:S 1 in Parklife DLC.

- Vehicles - Cars and trucks are modeled nicely, but all the transport vehicles we got at the end of the life of C:S 1 are gone. We only have one tram, one bus, one metro and one train. There are no articulated busses, short trams or single decker trains.

- Public transport stops and stations. Tram stops are incredibly basic (its only a sign, and you cant change that), the train stations and bus stations are very minimally modular. It's not like Transport Fever 2 where you can freely choose a track layout, or even put them underground. Also the train station is only useful for the main station and is too big to make any kind of urban rail system.

- The buildings themselves are huge and have big parking lots. They also still seem to be modelling only older buildings and no modern apartments/schools/etc at least for euro theme which would be nice for a city builder set in the present time...

- There are still no options for smaller residential roads. There is the avenue, but it looks ugly and has no sidewalks. You can either have it, or the 2 lane main road kind of thing.

Some positives though. Road building is much improved. It feels more natural and is much easier. Intersection marking is automatic. Rails are better modeled. Graphics are gorgeous.

Overall, this game is sadly full of bugs and overall, many things are a step down from C:S 1. I hope that the developers update it and eventually fix it, but for now, for the price, I cannot recommend it. It feels rushed.
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