- Publisher: Paradox Interactive
- Release Date: Oct 24, 2023
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
- Unscored
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Oct 19, 2023Cities Skylines 2 is an outstanding transportation simulation, but as a city-building game it still doesn't feel as polished as its predecessor.
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Nov 7, 2023Cities: Skylines II is a modest improvement on its predecessor, integrating a good amount of features and content to feel like a worthwhile sequel. The underlying design remains great and should eventually reach its full potential, but a lack of structure and poor technical performance mean that it's not yet time to make the switch.
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Oct 31, 2023A successful city-building simulation that builds on the strengths of its predecessor, but is dragged down by terrible performance.
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Oct 24, 2023In what was either a glitch or a very strange design choice, Cities: Skylines II sometimes insisted new businesses and residences were open even though construction cranes still occupied their footprints. At one point, I had an entire neighborhood of cranes supposedly occupied by productive citizens. Some combination of reloading, graphical tweaks, and waiting solved the issue, but it was a jarring oddity. So were my attempts to build farms that vanished into thin air upon being placed, forcing me to reload and try again.
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Oct 19, 2023In many ways, Cities Skylines 2 is addictive, but the word 'addictive' should be taken subjectively. The game has good addictive potential, like the runner's high after intense exercise or a delicious cup of coffee. But it also has bad addictive potential, like a narcotic, as you grind through the performance issues because you know it'll get good again soon, and you know your rig can totally handle it, as you promise to your friends.
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Oct 19, 2023My overall impressions of Cities Skylines 2 at launch are that it’s a fun game that makes some head-scratching decisions at times. It doesn’t feel like a whole step forward, leaving a lot by the roadside on its journey to 2.0. Invariably, there will be loads of DLC, and modding is coming sometime after launch. This city will grow, just as our old hometown did over time. Though I’m having a lot of fun with Cities Skylines 2 and learning these new city streets, I can’t help but long for my old stomping grounds while playing it. At least right now.
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Oct 19, 2023Even with some of its shortcomings, Cities: Skylines 2 delivers an extremely deep and content-rich city simulator that genre fans will definitely want to check out. It should once again remind fans why Colossal Order is the perfect studio to lead the urban city-building genre after the failings of the SimCity franchise. However, it is also hard to look past the fact that this game is launching with less content than the original game currently has. Couple that with the limitations the districts have and the lack of the custom-building tools that players loved in the original, and the game feels like it is being held back a bit at launch. Much of this may be fixed with post-launch updates, but right now, it feels like a pretty glaring omission.
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Oct 19, 2023Intricate, intuitive, and ambitious, Cities Skylines 2 successfully integrates all the major improvements that players might have wanted. Something personal is lost in its larger scale, while performance problems spoil the beauty, but this could one day become the superior city building game.
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Nov 8, 2023Through all the performance and optimization issues, all the problems with shading and rendering, I believe there's a good game waiting to be unlocked. However, as it stands, Cities Skylines II is a major disappointment that should have been pushed back to fix these issues. Instead, gamers are stuck dealing with yet another game that falls victim to a rush and will need multiple patches until we see what the final product actually is.
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Oct 19, 2023While the game shows promise, it is hindered by questionable decisions and plagued by stability issues. Cities: Skylines II might not change your life, but some fans could enjoy investing some hours crafting their cities, as long as the game does not crash and burn.
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Mar 9, 2024It is pointless to spend your time on Cities: Skylines 2 in its current state. Developers should decide what is really important — fixing the game or releasing DLCs.
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LEVEL (Czech Republic)Jan 17, 2024The creators have taken the best of the modding community and completely, it must be said for the better, overhauled, for example, the transport system, unlocking new buildings or artificial intelligence. Once they manage to overcome the birth pains, I have no doubt that this will be the best building strategy of all time. [Issue#331]
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Dec 4, 2023If you’re a die-hard city fan of city builders, and the idea of a new Cities: Skylines that’s 10 percent prettier and 5 percent more interesting has you salivating, you might wanna hop on this one right away. But for the rest of us, we can probably just keep chipping away at some other 2000-hour video gaming time sink. It’s not like this franchise is going away any time soon, after all.
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Oct 26, 2023Cities: Skylines II bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor, but the developers have significantly deepened, expanded, and improved its mechanics in almost every aspect. While it currently offers slightly less content, its foundation is as solid as a rock, and from a gameplay perspective, we are treated to an outstanding city-building strategy experience. Unfortunately, the overall enjoyment and impression are mercilessly shattered by the dismal technical state.
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Oct 24, 2023Cities Skylines 2 can be engaging - expanding your city provides a lot of fun. Unfortunately, it cannot overshadow a vast sea of greyness, identical, levitating cars and ugly graphics that do not explain ridiculous system requirements.
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Oct 24, 2023Coming straight from the predecessor with several DLCs, it feels much emptier in comparison and because of the existing problems, it feels unfinished to a certain extent. Not the best way to release a game. I'm sure there will be more to come, but in the here and now, Cities Skylines 2 just isn't yet the evolutionary leap that makes me want to switch.
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Oct 22, 2023These points make playing Cities: Skylines 2 much more challenging than anticipated. On the one hand, there is much to admire about the simulation work and building options available to players from the start, but the many issues mean having to wait and see if things get better down the line. The original game benefited from years of community mods and prolonged support, but the sequel simply cannot wait for the same situation to develop, especially not with an experienced team at the helm. At this point, jumping into the game feels like knowingly driving towards a holiday destination, knowing there’s a pile-up somewhere in the distance. The end goal might be attractive, but getting there will be a pain.
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Oct 20, 2023Cities: Skylines 2 has exciting new ideas, introduces improvements in the right places, but tears down these advances with indisputable performance and questionable design decisions. You keep getting the feeling that the game was released too early.
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Oct 19, 2023Cities: Skylines 2 is not the best game in the lineage of Will Wright's original 1989 classic. The champion is still the original Cities: Skylines, at least for now. If Skylines 2 gets the same incredible post-launch support and additional paid and free content as its predecessor, and if the modding community is allowed to thrive, I think this sequel might come out ahead in the long run. There are so many enjoyable new systems and exciting additions, sadly encased in an awful-looking block of concrete that gets in the way of how much I know I could be loving them. It makes too many promises of realism that its most basic features like zoning can't deliver on. It feels like playing a beta, or a very early Early Access game. Frankly, Skylines 2 could have used another few months in the city planning office. For now, it's more of a fixer-upper.
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| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Oct 20, 2023Cities: Skylines 2 is conservative, but extraordinary in adapting its own ideas and those of its community in the same game. Of course, its problems due to a poorly managed PC version overshadow everything good there is. [Not Recommended]
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Oct 24, 2023Suffice it to say I’m excited for this game, and so much of me wants to recommend every bit of it. Right now, the performance issues make that very, very hard. I’m not sure why Colossal and Paradox didn’t delay all of it until 2024 instead of just consoles, but here we are. Much like other games that launched in a rough state, I’m certain that Cities: Skylines II will eventually be something to behold. For now, however, there’s a bit of buyer beware. Check those system requirements folks…
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Oct 19, 2023The game delivers on its core concept, and much of its long-term success is going to depend on the things that kept the previous game so vibrantly alive for many years. It seems that the exact shape and operation of modding is still to be determined, and every time I play the game with my (fairly beefy) PC, it sounds like it is going to launch into space. Both of these things seem resolvable, and configurable, for Colossal Order; notably, Cities: Skylines changed many times after release with the addition of new content, and I would not be shocked if Skylines 2 took a similar path of regular releases and transformations.
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Oct 19, 2023I haven't had the performance issues everyone's been fretting about, for what that's worth. It ran absolutely fine on “medium” with my usual anti-blur options, until I put everything up to "high" again for screenshots and it became both uglier and much slower. Colossal Order have been quick to issue acknowledgements and a second review build of graphical fixes, and “intend for these performance improvements to be delivered at or very shortly after launch”. But glitches that only happen in fancy mode matter little to me, and will probably come out in the wash.