Recent reviews by Allie

Only 1.5 hours in but please it's not pronounced "Arigan"


sincerely,

oregon resident

(that's my only major gripe so far, i like the characters, enjoy the conversation choices, and how they affect the story going forward. aesthetic is pretty great too imo.)

Alright after investing around ~6 hours into the game at this point, I can flesh out some of a review.

There are plenty of reviews about performance issues, I will not be covering them due to that. However this review will spoil game play up until around 14,000 Population.

So where to begin...


While I will acknowledge that it is incredibly difficult to balance a governmental budget in real life, at 14k population I have only nearly achieved a balanced budget for about 6 seconds. And that wasn't even balanced, I was still in the red.

What this does is make the player reliant on the bonuses from reaching milestones, and playing the game of trying to balance the budget or take out loans to maintain operation until you get enough exp to reach the next milestone. I've had to do this multiple times. Several hours spent just balancing a budget just to get several chirper notifications about how my services aren't good enough. Oh yeah, speaking of which..


In theory, as you gain population, you should expand city services like fire, police, and medical. These come with massive costs, and the medical clinic especially costs 105k per month while only costing ~60k to initially build. These upkeep costs add up, and fast. Especially when your population is still relatively small, it can become incredibly difficult to keep up with the costs when your tax revenues are next to nothing. Alongside that, there's a new system of efficiency .

What is efficiency, you might ask. Efficiency is a boost or loss of performance of employees of every business, industry, and city service. These can be based on the health of employees, the budget, the amount of natural resources, and 'employee happiness'. These factors sounds great when you have maxed out budgets and a well running city, but at the start, they can cripple city services with ease. Every 2% I lowered the budget of a service, because you can't pull it for just 1% for some reason, meant each city service took a massive 3-5% hit in efficiency. Trying to save money to survive to your next milestone? Too bad, everyone is dying and nothing is functional.


This issue is as the title states: from around 1500 population till now, at 14000, all my commercial businesses state that there are not enough customers to sustain their business. Even as commercial demand increases. Even as population skyrockets. What causes those factors to not affect that issue is beyond me, but it's extremely frustrating to have half the screen be covered in issue bubbles I can't solve.


Public transit in this version is extremely limited, and if you just want to improve your population's happiness then just place down bus and taxi stops. No need to make a route this time, the star increase comes from plopping down the stop, not having a bus route run to it or even having a route running. While I will acknowledge that this feels extremely prototypical for using the American buildings pack instead of the European, it makes it feel as though public transit is more for improving citizen happiness than traffic.

Onto highways, alongside most other roadways in this game. I will admit to having playing Cities: Skylines 1 with a multitude of workshop mods to improve my experience, however I don't think that excuses drivers turning left onto the opposing lanes of a freeway from an on-ramp. This is something, in my travels between Europe and America, that I have NEVER ONCE SEEN. It makes building highways without a median or road separation near impossible, as every spot will form a traffic jam as drivers cross whole halves of a highway to reach the other side.

At least there's a roundabout generator, right? Even though it's extremely limited and doesn't form that large a roundabout and will only place if it can destroy some of the zoned buildings and won't place if it can't and there's no telling if it will or won't until you try!



Listen, I was really excited for this game, pre-ordered and everything. But between the widely known about performance issues, which at this point are causing my game to stutter, and the limited ability to actually build a functional city, I'm just going to put this on the shelf for now.

Do I recommend the game?

Currently? No, absolutely not. Play the first one and enjoy it. With mods, you can achieve roughly the same game play as 2 with far better industry, far more to work with, and far better performance.

Do I think C:S 2 can improve?

Yes. I've seen and played hundreds of hours of C:S 1, and if updates can bring some stabilization, and mods can be allowed, this game can flourish for the future. But the future is not now, and if future proofing your game means it struggles now, then it may not survive to the future you built it to endure. And that would be quite a shame.

It's like Farmville but for men.