Recent reviews by Gibbo1438

As a kid - SimCity was one of my favorite games. I had a box of floppy disks where I kept my SimCity 2000 saves next to my old Compaq Desktop. When SimCity 4 came out in 2003 - it blew my mind: the scale, the individual simulation, the addition of the region management system, and ease of building giant cities really brought the experience to life.

For me Cities: Skylines II recaptures that childlike joy I got from playing SimCity 4. It is however vastly different from Cities: Skylines. I personally love it and love the developers even more for making the hard decision to develop something radically different in this city builder space rather than a safer, more similar sequel to the original - bravo!

For the interested reader, I'll name a few highlights of the specific differences between this game a Cities I:
- The aesthetic of the game has been reworked and presented in a cooler colour palette and more realistic scaling of in-game objects to one-another compared with the original: the result is a game that feels less "cartoony" and a bit more "realistic" (To see another game that did this for a like-for-like comparison, look at the aesthetic differences between Civilization 6 and Civilization 5).

- Significant improvements to dynamic lighting and shadow-casting are clear: there is a full day-night cycle and seasons to the game that affect your environment and take full advantage of this (night is properly dark for instance)

- Spline-based road building has been completely rebuilt from the ground up: it is absolutely incredible and the best executed version of this mechanic I have seen unmodded. For road-nuts, you can build complex interchanges such as parclos and trumpets with ease out of the box - this is a massive achievement and must have been maddeningly hard to code.

- The simulation is far more individual-centric in this game than the original: focusing on a bottom-up build of needs based on people's wealth, what they do, where they work, and where they commute to (again, look at Sim-City 4's Rush Hour expansion for similarities, you could see a Sim and their commute path for instance)


I could go on - but to summarize: this City Builder to me is a tour de force of game design: a large degree of creative freedom and risk-taking is clearly on show here to build a game that is fundamentally different from the original. Cities I made me feel like I was finishing a painting, carefully placing individual objects and embellishments to make my city finely detailed and alive. Cities II feels like more of a return to the city-builders of old, building my city on a grand scale: zoning huge distances and focusing on mechanics of tuning amenities and making people in the simulation happy to grow.

No doubt, fans of the original game may be disappointed with some of these changes, and were hoping for an experience much more similar to the first game. I am not one of them: after countless expansions and a healthy modding community for almost a decade, Cities I in my view has been exhausted in it's ability to showcase the City-Building genre.

Thank you Colossal Order for making a city builder that made me feel like a kid again this holiday: sitting at my desktop - with my box of floppy disks in hand - carefully tending to my fledgling city. I can't wait to see how the expansions to this game round it out.

P.s. Please do add more radio station music, and stations - my only major criticism is that due to the low number of songs and ads, I listen to my own music in the background instead of the game's.

Almost entirely responsible for violent altercations between me and my roomates in my first year of university. Trevor, we never wanted Catholicism, but now we have it anyways. It's okay though, because he Austria'ed us. 10/10 Would play again.