I think it is really difficult to talk about Cities: Skylines II without acknowledging the obvious statement: “I already have the first game, why should I pick up this sequel?” It is a difficult question in itself to answer because of the modding community.

There are also the countless DLCs that Paradox and Colossal Order put out, and generally the feel of this second jumping-off point to succeeding SimsCity plays a big part in how you’ll individually make that assessment. With a number of changes for the better, the question becomes how much are they worth, and what can’t mods currently do with the original that are native to this sequel?

The original Cities: Skylines was largely focused on traffic management. Despite an arguably simple model being used, you always fought the traffic at every intersection or clogged highway on/off ramp. This time, however, the model accounts for a lot of changes. Specifically, it allows for there to be questionable driving practices.

In the rain, cars will spin out, they’ll have adorable little accidents, and a whole lot more that is part of the event journal featuring all the things you’ll ignore in your quest to recreate Swindon. You might not be able to make the magic roundabout, but natively there is a tool to create roundabouts without fighting the curved roads anymore.

On top of this is a selection of progression tools, buildings to plop down that provide Internet access, varied special buildings, different ways of doing transport, natural disasters native to the release, and countless other details. The biggest possible ground-level change is the new set of zoning tools, which shift away from only high and low in the four categories of housing, commercial, industrial, and offices.

They also also offer special industries like farming/cultivating/mining, on top of the style of buildings. If that wasn’t enough of a change, there has also been the removal of something I’m hoping later modding can solve. The zoning brush is only one square or you use either the fill or marquee tools.

Gone too are the days of having to worry about linking someone up to the power and poo pipe grid. Any common roads that will connect to buildings carry water and electricity underneath. This isn’t the case for highways though. There is certainly a lot that is different, but maybe not a lot that is inherently selling a second release outside of an updated visual style. I would have said performance is a selling point, as the original game had a tendency to clog up due to CPU limitations. However, I think calling the performance of Cities: Skylines II decent would simply be wrong.

Activating any level of shadows seemed to drop performance no matter any other setting. Additionally, getting a constant 60FPS at 1080P is difficult. Running on a mid-range 30 series with a newer 12th-generation CPU than is recommended and 16GB of RAM, the low “global graphical quality” was pushing to the lows of 40 when taxed and 59 when not. High with motion blur and shadows disabled hits about 25. It is recommended that you run an RTX 3080 to get the best performance. I found it best to sit and tweak everything until you find the balance between performance and graphical quality.

48 hours ahead of the embargo lifting on Thursday, we were privy to a press build that previews some of the optimization being done. The reason I’m separating it from normal performance talk is that it isn’t a finished build and some features are buggy (i.e. flickering textures), so I don’t know when this performance patch will come. It could be Monday in a day-1 patch or a week later. I will say that it is better, though still not as you would hope for overall. I don’t feel comfortable talking too much about it as it could change greatly, but is a step in the right direction.

What has changed mechanically overall to make Cities: Skylines II feel like something new and different? This time out there is a greater focus on the environment, the effects weather has on people, and really balancing a budget plays a big part in how you succeed going forward. Some ways of generating power (such as geothermal plants) require groundwater nodes which appear throughout the maps. Though you also use groundwater for the city’s water, so ground pollutants play a big factor. Of course, being the master of industry, your air pollutants also affect people too.

The third in that list I’ve mentioned actually plays what is arguably the largest part in stepping away from the first game’s shadow. The economy has been overhauled in such a way that haphazardly building a little city and watching it function is no longer an option. You need it to be profitable and simple zoning on its own isn’t going to be enough anymore. Selling off an abundance of power and water can help, but the new specialized industries and giving tax breaks to the right industries are where profit comes from. Termed “production,” these are exports that your basic industry previously blanketed, for the most part.

Not only are you given a greater depth of production to work with and sell off to other cities, but the taxation goes to a much greater depth too. Do you want to tax highly educated people more than those under-educated/poorer people? You can, just as you can do to specific industries that you don’t like or think aren’t being taxed enough for their environmental destruction. It is an obvious statement, but offices can export software but some offices also work in media, so you have to balance the tax on those to entice companies into your city.

The special industries take over for previous district management and create raw materials like cotton, livestock, agriculture, and so on. Broken down in the economy window, you can see imports that create a deficit over your exports. Of course, you want to create that surplus to export but Cities: Skylines II goes into great detail. It is obvious that tax plays into this, but when I say there is great detail I mean every specific industry is tracked in the production tab and in the tax tab. There is a lot of management (finally) in that regard.

There are a lot of improvements to make the management as much a part of your gameplay as fighting the traffic. Though as I’ve said, some elements have been taken away too. Previously you’d see sudden spikes in death rates due to a large population influx X time ago. An easy way to combat this in the original release was to delete housing, and it was most satisfying to use the brush tool to clean up the area. Now the brush tool is one single square, and the marquee just isn’t as satisfying. Don’t get me started on my dislike of the fill tool.

It is little details like this that feel meddled with, touched, and tweaked a little too much. City policies have been distilled down to only five options, with districts having only seven. Some of it has been broken up into the tax window allowing you to give tax breaks to specific industries, but other things (either from DLCs or the base game) are missing. There are a great number of improvements, but just as much as there are steps forward, I think there are some drunken stumbles backward. That’s what makes recommending Cities: Skylines II so difficult.

Progression is a step forward, as it no longer goes by citizen count alone. Building special buildings or generally increasing the population progressively will gain you XP. Over time that accumulates and after meeting X amount of XP required, your city’s status increases. Going from a tiny town to a mega-region opens up parts of the skill tree which opens up later parts of health care, education, policing, and so on. This I would say is much better at giving you different ways to progress instead of growing the population simply because you have to.

Of course, another big change is the map. They are not just different from the originals we saw, they’re much larger. Before, the scale meant one map tile was almost 2km² and you could have up to 9 without modding, which is about 18km². Now you can have 441 tiles resulting in a play area of about 159km². Not only that, you don’t need to be locked together. You can break off your city into little regions as long as you can water and power them. Though the power export I mentioned already works both ways, as does water trade, which means you don’t need polluting power stations all over the place.

Once again, this is a step forward and an improvement that is great to have, but I find it difficult to say these are selling points. Especially as the more out-there and cartoonish elements have been somewhat stripped away. As much as your cities now look stunning in their snow-blanketed form (or autumnal oranges) the urge to sit and watch your cities has gone. Trucks no longer have weird designs or attachments to make them stand out, and the animations of dead bodies being carried out are ripped from your morbid hands.

I enjoy a large portion of Cities: Skylines II but as much as it is an improvement in some regards to the original’s release, it feels like a bit of a different game entirely. For better or worse, I don’t completely know. It is still the city management sim at its heart, but it is missing some key features (and performance) and interesting ideas that put it in that “everyone should play this” bracket the first came to shortly after release. Currently, it sits in the “wait for a performance patch/some mods to build up” as that’s where I think Cities: Skylines II will shine once again.

With the improvements to the roads and the massive improvement to the economy, it feels like you can build up a decent little city in no time. Cities: Skylines II is more accessible and undeniably enjoyable, but there is a wealth of features long-standing players are used to/comfortable with missing. As a result, I can see major disagreements with it at launch before the updates, DLCs, and countless mods makeover its shortcomings.

Ultimately, I enjoy Cities: Skylines II. Unlike a lot of reviews, I think I’ll keep playing for a long time to come, but I know that I’m looking further into the future and currently we’re not at that solid performance, great features, and must-have mods stage, yet.

A PC review copy of Cities: Skylines II was provided by Paradox Interactive for this review.

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Cities: Skylines II

$49.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• An expansion of the economy to give greater depth.
• Bigger maps, bigger cities, more traffic problems.
• Roundabouts, or "turning circles" if you are weird.

Cons

• Launch performance.
• Where is my large paintbrush tool?
• Some of the simulation detail feels missing.