In the technological world of city builders, 2015’s Cities: Skylines made a name for itself as an uncompromising yet delicate game where players create a variety of municipal plates to keep things in order in their fictional cities. needed to rotate. After eight years and millions of digital building permits, Colossal Order is back to create a convincing sequel in Cities: Skylines II. Iterative additions don’t arrive without their consequential flaws, but Cities: Skylines II still boasts all the complexity and customization necessary to provide players with a challenging and immersive city-building experience.
In Cities: Skylines II, you build an entire world from the beginning of a terrarium. You start by zoning your districts, then add functionality with electricity and plumbing before creating serviceable districts to attract and satisfy dedicated citizens. I unintentionally rebuilt the town I grew up in, tossing aside all the industrial features with electricity and water facilities.
Despite its sandbox impression, Cities: Skylines II has an engaging progression system, offering scale rewards as you progress from a small village to a bustling megalopolis. Each milestone achieved provides development points that you can use to unlock systems like police and parks in infrastructure trees, while expansion permits allow you to expand your city limits and access these resources. Provides the access you need to keep the lights on. Despite how mundane it may seem, opening and investing in underground parking and figuring out how it can help my citizens feel revelatory thanks to this guided approach.
As my city grew more complex, it opened doors to signature buildings like factories or mansions and more contemporary concerns like pollution and congestion, inspiring me to find Arcadian solutions and give my citizens a better life. Even in success, locals had a lot to say about it via in-game Twitter clone Chirper. Just like real social media, there was a mountain of nonsense to read about my supposedly terrible choice, with a few compliments scattered in between. How dare I use green energy to power the city. It is now very high. It forces you to come to terms with the fact that not every digital person will enjoy your utopian vision.
The rapid growth of my cities took a toll on the game’s visuals and performance – Cities: Skylines II struggled to keep up with its ambitious scale. Up close, there are moments of strange beauty, where sunlight streams through gaps in the castle grounds, or you catch the shadow of your own terraformed mountain. However, from a general top-down perspective, the world feels flat and somewhat cold, not helped by systemic chugging, error messages, and frequent crashes, which wasted pockets of my playtime. give While I hope these issues will be resolved for players after launch, it was frustrating and frustrating to contend with while fixing my pipes, wires, and bus routes.
You can zoom in and connect with people living in your city, by clicking on them to learn about their education, family, pets and socioeconomic status. At one point, I contemplated razing the entire suburb before I saw one of my unassuming valley dwellers doing yoga in the backyard. After reading their fact file, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy their family home.
If you miss the many complaints from citizens, you’re alerted to bigger problems by the booming emergency alerts that disrupt cities: the soothing Brian Eno-esque soundtrack of Skylines II, which Interrupted by suitably annoying fantasy ads. Environmental disasters form tough urban planning lessons, and you’re able to manage traffic control, bunkers and firefighters to minimize damage. The first time I witnessed a tornado, it skirted the edges of my city, and I held my breath, praying it wouldn’t reach the center, immediately investing in better protection after the fact.
Assessing the significance of Cities: Skylines II is not easy. As I dig deeper into its complex systems, more and more interesting features continue to come into focus. The sequel is ambitious and wants players to take on hundreds of considerations as they build towards Elysium, and it delivers on that aspect. Yet, unfortunately, the game’s constant technical issues undermine this calculated success.