Cities Skylines Ii -

Zoning isn’t just about “jobs vs. homes.” Industry now has depth: a timber company needs wood, which requires forestry, which needs workers and road access. You can specialize districts for petrochemicals, agriculture, or electronics. You’ll watch raw materials travel to processors, then to factories, then to commercial zones. When your highway clogs, the electronics plant slows down, then shops run low on luxury goods, then citizens complain about “missing services.” It’s an actual system, not window dressing.

Day one lacked: proper European/Vanilla style variations for all zones (only North American and European were available, and even those were incomplete), in-game tutorials for complex systems (geothermal power? international connections?), and even basic photo mode. Patches have added some, but the launch felt six months early.

The road tools are a delight. Parallel roads, asymmetrical lanes, roundabouts, traffic lights, stop signs, lane connectors—you can micro-manage every intersection. Traffic AI is smarter: vehicles change lanes earlier, use slip lanes, and actually obey lane arrows. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange without downloading 17 mods. Cities Skylines II

It’s a brilliant simulation buried under technical debt. When everything works—when you watch raw ore travel by train to a smelter, then to a parts factory, then to a tool shop, then to a hardware store, and a citizen buys a hammer to upgrade their home— Cities: Skylines II is unmatched. But too often, you’re fighting performance, missing features, or unclear feedback loops.

Snow isn’t cosmetic. Snowplows become a service; road maintenance matters. Leaf cleanup in autumn, heatwaves increasing electricity demand, thunderstorms causing localized flooding—the environment pushes back in fair, interesting ways. Zoning isn’t just about “jobs vs

In two years, with mods, DLC, and performance fixes, this could be a 9.5/10 masterpiece. Today, it’s an ambitious, frustrating, deeply promising foundation. Buy it if you want to build the foundation now . Wait if you want to live in the finished house.

The art style is more realistic but also flatter. Buildings have better texture detail, but the global lighting can feel washed out. Worse, forced Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) creates noticeable ghosting and softness in motion. There’s no native resolution rendering option. Mods can help, but vanilla visuals range from “pleasant” to “muddy” depending on time of day and weather. You’ll watch raw materials travel to processors, then

The economy simulation is deep, but the game does a poor job explaining it. Why is your industry failing? Maybe raw materials aren’t reaching them. Maybe too many workers are commuting elsewhere. Maybe a cargo train station is overloaded. The game gives charts and graphs, but not the intuitive alerts of, say, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic . You’ll spend time guessing. The Bad: Missing Features & Rough Edges Modding Support – “Later” Cities: Skylines lived and breathed on mods. The sequel promised native Paradox Mods integration, but at launch, modding tools (asset editor, map editor, code modding) were absent. Months later, they’ve partially arrived, but it’s nowhere near Steam Workshop’s ecosystem. For a game built on “modders will fix it,” launching without modding is a major wound.

Here’s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines II as of its launch window and early updates. When Cities: Skylines launched in 2015, it resurrected the city-builder genre from a long SimCity slumber. Nearly a decade later, Colossal Order returns with a sequel promising true next-gen urban simulation. No more fake traffic, no more city size limits, no more agent limits. Cities: Skylines II aims for the stars—but arrives with engine trouble. The Good: A Living, Breathing Metropolis Scale and Seamlessness The first game felt like a collection of tiles. Here, you unlock tiles gradually, but the potential map is enormous—over 150 square kilometers. You can build a farming outpost, a distant airport, and a downtown core without a single loading screen. More importantly, the city feels contiguous. Citizens don’t despawn; they commute, get stuck, find alternate routes, and even move if their commute is too long. That alone changes everything.

Instead of just unlocking buildings by population, you earn “development points” from milestones (e.g., “have 5,000 highly educated citizens”). You choose what to unlock next—a new power plant, a transit hub, or advanced road tools. It gives a sense of strategic choice rather than linear grind. The Mixed: Potential Held Back Performance & Optimization This is the elephant in the room. On release, even high-end PCs (RTX 4090, i9-13900K) struggled to maintain 60fps at 1440p. The game is heavily CPU-bound due to the deep agent simulation—every citizen, every car, every good being tracked. Colossal Order has improved performance with patches (LOD adjustments, occlusion culling), but medium-range systems still see stutter once cities pass 100k population. The game looks good, but not this demanding good.

In 2023-24, a modern city builder launching without bicycles or dedicated pedestrian streets is baffling. The first game had them (via DLC, but still). Here, citizens walk on sidewalks, but you can’t build bike lanes or car-free zones without workarounds. For a game that prides itself on traffic simulation, ignoring micromobility is a strange gap.