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Oct 26, 2023 · It’s been eight years since the original Cities: Skylines was released, and its successor is certainly bigger and more ambitious. But scale alone is not enough, and what ought to have been an...
- Chris Allnutt
- An ambitious sequel, but the basic mechanics can't keep up with everything it wanted to do.
- What We Said About The Original Cities: Skylines
- Score: 8.5*
- What's the best SimCity-like city builder?
- Cities Skylines II Screenshots
- Len's Top 10 City Builders
- Verdict
- More Reviews by Leana Hafer
- IGN Recommends
By Leana Hafer
Updated: Jan 31, 2024 7:39 pm
Posted: Oct 19, 2023 4:00 pm
While the original Cities: Skylines practically brought its breed of open-ended city builder back from the dead (after SimCity 2013 killed it), Cities: Skylines 2 is a sequel that often feels like it took more steps back than it did forward. It's full of exciting and gratifying new mechanics for managing your economy and creating more realistic metropolises. But it also asks you to do a lot of busywork if you don't want the end product to look horrendous on close inspection, and sacrifices some of the user friendliness of its predecessor to fit in more bells and whistles. I’m not ready to tear it all down, but right now there’s an unsightly case of urban blight that’s going to take some major technical renovations to clear up.
I'm going to spend a lot of time criticizing Skylines 2 here, because it is certainly disappointing given what I've come to expect from Colossal Order. But I do need to say up front what Skylines 2 is not – and that's a bad game. It's perfectly serviceable. In some ways it's genuinely innovative and pushes the entire genre forward. I can recommend it pretty easily, as long as you meet its fairly steep technical requirements. My Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 3080 were able to handle it okay on just shy of max settings, even as my cities’ populations were getting into the tens of thousands, but the devs themselves have cautioned that optimization is still a work in progress and they won't hit the benchmarks they were hoping for on a wide variety of hardware by launch.
And I'll get into more of what I think it does right in a bit. But oh boy, there is a lot of unfortunate stuff to get through first.
More than anything, Cities: Skylines is about the simple joy of building. It’s a really impressive and often beautiful simulation, where an amazing number of virtual people go about their business across a huge swath of land. Getting in and creating something is easy, though mastering it will require extensive research on community wikis to underst...
*IGN now scores on a 10-point scale instead of 100. To convert the the current system, pretend the second number doesn't exist.
Read the full Cities: Skylines review
SimCity (the original)
SimCity 2000
SimCity 3000
SimCity 4
SimCity (2013)
Cities: Skylines
At the same time, I was highly disappointed that residential taxes can only be set based on education level, of all things. Not on citizen wealth. Not on zoning density. Not even by defining a custom district. I can tax each individual type of industry based on what it produces, but residents solely based on how many degrees they have? Frankly, I kind of hate this.
SMALL TOWN GIRL
The larger scale of cities is another double-edged sword. I almost exclusively played Skylines 1 with the Realistic Population mod due to how comically detached from reality residency limits could be in the vanilla game. Skylines 2 has definitely moved toward more realistic occupancy and employment numbers for each building type, and I adore the fact that you can now zone mixed-use buildings with commercial on the ground floor and housing above.
But the huge footprints for things like city services are very hard to find space for, especially given all of the terraforming I mentioned earlier. The only passenger train station, for example, is enormous. Look at this monster! The only high school building available takes up multiple city blocks, so forget about trying to fit it into a small town. If Skylines 2 gets the same support Skylines 1 did, I'm sure DLC, free updates, and modders will work these issues out eventually. There are glaring holes in the selection. But when I take a step back I have to admit that the number of assets we did get – between zoned, ploppables, and the fantastic signature buildings that can tie a whole neighborhood together – is generous compared to vanilla Skylines 1.
I just reviewed Cities: Skylines 2, so let's take a look back and rank the best city builders over the ages.
Chirper, Skylines in-universe version of Twitter, also seems to be completely disconnected from reality. That may help it seem more realistic compared to its real-world counterpart in 2023. But it sure is annoying to constantly hear citizens complaining about #crime when I have a two percent crime rate. Or lamenting how the city is way too loud, when I can look at my nifty overlay and see that the only place with significant noise pollution is right next to the power plant, far away from anyone's house or any shopping areas. Just don't hang out there, Kyle!
Cities: 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 sequ...
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Oct 19, 2023 · Cities: Skylines 2 will be released Oct. 24 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Paradox Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships ...
Sep 15, 2024 · There’s no doubt that the performance of Cities: Skylines II has improved since launch, but don’t think you’re going to be installing this on a bog-standard Windows laptop anytime soon.
- Barry Collins
Oct 19, 2023 · Cities: Skylines 2 is an ambitious sequel that might have bitten off more than it can chew – be prepared to do a lot of terraforming if you don't want your metropolis to look like a nightmare.
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Cities: Skylines - Mass Transit brings several new systems into play to help citizens traverse their towns in speed and style. Commuters can now get around on water, up high mountain peaks, and even through the sky thanks to the addition of ferries, monorails, cable cars, and blimps.
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What is Cities Skylines?
Jul 28, 2022 · Cities: Skylines creator packs and minor DLCs. These are smaller packs of custom-made assets that don't generally add new features to Skylines, but offer some thematic ways to spice up your...
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