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.
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. Cities Skylines II
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. Day one lacked: proper European/Vanilla style variations for
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. Here’s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines
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.
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.