I've been playing Cities: Skylines for almost 10 years. As soon as I started playing it, I recognized it as the definitive city-building game. It blew its contemporaries, such as SimCity (2013) and Cities XL out of the water. It was a smash success that developed a massive following and spawned 11 full expansions, 4 mini-expansions, 21 asset packs, numerous music packs, and thousands of player-created mods and custom assets.
Creating a sequel to a game that is so beloved and content-rich can be challenging or daunting. Sequels to extensively-expanded games, such as any given entry of The Sims, Civilization, Crusader Kings, World of Warcraft, Rock Band, and so forth, run the extreme risk of feeling bland, empty, and incomplete compared to their content-rich and/or mechanically-complex predecessors. This can leave the sequel feeling underwhelming to long-time audiences, who might return to the older game because they crave the extensive, familiar content. The Sims in particular is infamous for stripping out popular expansion content, and then selling that content back to consumers again (and again) as an expansion pack for the sequel. The most notable example is probably that every Sims game has a "Pets" expansion, because EA could never bite the bullet and just put dogs and cats in the vanilla launch of a sequel.
Sequels to expanded games often strip out popular content to re-sell as expansions.
The sequel to Cities: Skylines is a bit of a mixed bag in this regard. On the one hand, yeah, a lot of content from the original game is absent from the sequel, and the options for what players can build can feel a bit sparse. On the other hand, the vanilla release of Cities: Skylines II retains something from almost every one of the original game's expansions. It even includes content and mechanics that were part of some of the smaller content packs and from popular mods.
The vanilla game includes a day/night cycle that was introduced in the original's After Dark expansion. Some of the economic models of the After Dark and Industries expansions have been expanded in scope to apply to the entire game, thus alleviating some of the need for explicit tourism, leisure, or specialized industry districts. It took the winter themes of Snowfall and fleshed it out into a full seasonal cycle. It includes some of the weather and disaster events from Natural Disasters, as well as some of the early-warning and shelter infrastructure. It includes modular upgrades and customizations to certain buildings and infrastructure, as well as large industrial areas, that fills a similar role as the modular areas of Parklife, Industries, Campus, and Airports (though I'll talk more about this mechanic later in the review). It includes pedestrian roads from Plazas & Promenades. It includes eco-friendly variations of utilities that were part of the Green Cities expansion. And of course, it has road-building and transit-planning tools that largely leave Mass Transit in the dust.
It even includes sports parks and parking lots, which were late DLC content released for the original game in the last couple years. And the road-building and traffic-management tools have much of the functionality from the popular "Road Anarcy" and "Network Extension" mods. And that's to say nothing of all the brand new content, mechanics, and more complicated simulation! So even though it is not as full or content-rich as its predecessor with its double-digit expansions (how could it be?!), Cities: Skylines II is still a fully-featured and content-rich city-builder that can be played for many hours before going stale.
Some content and mechanics from almost every CS1 expansion are included in CS2's launch.
But as I said, there is quite a lot of content from the original game that did not make the cut, and which is sorely missed. For one thing, bicycles and bike lanes aren't in the game at launch, which is a kind of baffling decision (considering this game is developed in Scandinavia, where bicycling is huge). There also aren't any walls or fences or quays, and the tool for disabling zoning on either side of a road is strangely absent. So it's back to using pedestrian paths to remove zoning from arterial roads. Zoning is actually quite a bit of a pain in the ass in the sequel, and I am frequently fighting with the road layout, zoning squares, and pedestrian paths to try to get my city to look the way I want.
If you were particularly fond of leveling up and expanding things like industrial parks, nature preserves, amusement parks, universities, and so forth, then you might be disappointed by their absence. In fact, recreation, leisure, and tourism options are very spares in the sequel, as it lacks the tourism and leisure districts of the After Dark expansion. You also won't be building any small fishing villages, since Sunset Harbor is the one expansion that doesn't have anything being carried over into the sequel.
To its credit, the vanilla release of Cities: Skylines II feels more content rich and mechanically-compelling compared to the vanilla release of the original Cities: Skylines. But there's so much absent from the original game, that I un-install the original from my PC with a degree of trepidation.
There is some content from CS1 that is conspicuously absent.
Cities of all shapes and sizes
For the most part, Cities: Skylines 2 plays like the original Cities: Skylines. There are no massive upheavals in how we lay out roads, zone buildings, place city services, or manage transit networks, and at the end of the day, it's still a game about balancing zoning demand and a budget. These are all more or less the same. Perhaps the biggest change to how Cities: Skylines II plays compared to the original is the progression and unlock system.
The first game tied all of its progression and unlocks directly to city population, which constantly pushed the player towards growing the city. Growth was the number 1 priority, regardless of geographic constraints or the overall aesthetic that the player desired. Budget surplus was a close second. There was, essentially, one way to play Cities: Skylines: grow you city as large as possible and turn it into a wealthy, modern metropolis.
Cities: Skylines II changes up the priorities quite a bit. Progression is now split between population growth, construction, and citizen happiness. The general well-being of your citizens is now a direct path to progress! Rapidly growing your city by placing roads and zoning residences is one way to upgrade your city, but maintaining the well-being of a relatively small population is an equally viable path to progress. Once a city service is unlocked by a given progression milestone, further sub-services and infrastructure are unlocked at the player's whim by spending points in a development tree for each service. It's basically like an ability skill tree for a character in most action games, except instead of spending ability points to unlock a double-jump or increased health, you're unlocking train stations, post offices, or banks.
Many city services and infrastructure are unlocked in a series of development trees.
This adds further freedom and versatility to how a player choses to develop your city. If you want to build a small college town, you can keep your city small, and spend all your development points in the education tree, until you unlock the type of university that you want. Or if you want your city to be built around water-based transit, you can spend your development points towards harbors and ferries, and bypass things like trains, trams, or subways entirely.
This change to the progression system makes a wider variety of cities viable. Cities don't all have to be dense urban metropolises modeled after the likes of New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, or Copenhagen. You can now build small farming or mining communities, college towns, suburban cities, or even highway rest stops.
Want to build a version of Sedona, Arizona, or Barstow, California? That's viable now!
In fact, you don't even have to necessarily build a power plant right at the start of the game either. Being able to import electricity means that the beginning of a new game no longer has to be a tedious process of laying down a starting power plant, power lines, water pumps, and trying to separate polluting industrial zones from residential zones (all within your limited starting budget). Players can import electricity, and both water and power travel through roads automatically. A new city also starts with a much larger sum of money. If you want, you can go straight into using your starting cash to lay down a road network and start zoning homes and shops.
Buying dis-contiguous plots in the large maps allows for proper satellite towns.
This philosophy of building cities of varying shapes and sizes is reinforced by the geography of the map. Maps are larger, overall, but the areas of land expansion that you can buy are actually smaller than in the original game, but you can buy a lot more of them. And this time, they don't have to be contiguous! This means you can purchase plots of land speckled along a highway, and build small satellite towns or rest stops without necessarily having to purchase and develop the land in between. This is particularly helpful for accessing remote industrial resources like ore and oil, or for spacing out polluting industry further from your population centers. It also lets you build 2 cities across the map from each other, that can eventually converge in the middle to form one large city, like the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
... well, cities of some shapes and sizes...
Unfortunately, Cities: Skylines 2's aforementioned lack of variety of content does severely limit the potential of this new progression system. The lack of certain leisure infrastructure means that we won't be building any beach resorts, ski resorts, or little tourist traps nestled next to a national park. So while inspirations like Sedona or Barstow are viable to build now, we still can't quite build places like Aspen, Colorado, or Riverside, California, or West Yellowstone. Hopefully, these sorts of cities will be made viable with future expansion packs.
Remote regions of the map combined with seasonal cycles would be ripe for nature preserves or ski resorts,
if only they were in the game...
Honestly, I am really baffled by the lack of things like ski resorts, public beaches, and nature preserves, given the size of the maps and the new seasonal cycle. There's so much more space to play with now, and the ability to buy dis-contiguous tiles allows the player to create truly remote areas or districts. That last omission is particularly disappointing because national parks were among my favorite features in the original Cities: Skylines. Related structures like ploppable roadside motels from the Hotels & Retreats expansion are also omitted; though, hotels and motels can show up as zoned commercial buildings, and they do provide lodging services to tourists.
The game models seasonal leisure activities,
but doesn't include any winter activities.
The seasonal cycle also includes mechanics for seasonal leisure activities, which is just flat-out not used by the game at launch. I noticed that some buildings specifically provide "Summer Leisure", such as the Water Park and Community Pool, but I haven't found any buildings yet that offer "Winter Leisure". So it seems like Colossal Order put a whole system in place for modeling seasonal leisure, but just didn't give us the buildings for them ... yet. I assume that seasonal leisure activities will probably be the focus of the first (or second) expansion, but I really feel like there should be some winter activities in the vanilla launch, so that this particular feature is actually used in-game. At least a skating rink or something!
Colossal Order has also lifted one of the biggest early-game constraints that the original placed on new cities, while also making the budget a bit harder to balance in the long run. The only real financial challenge of the original game was keeping your initial road and utility networks under the limited starting budget. After that, it was mostly smooth-sailing.
This time around, Colossal Order gives us a much higher starting budget to work with, and is much more generous with how much money is granted by hitting progression milestones. Right from the start of the game, players have a lot fewer constraints on setting up the initial bones of a new city. However, to offset this, infrastructure and service maintenance is much more expensive. You should probably expect to operate in the red for much longer than in the first game. You also have a lot more flexibility in how you set up your tax infrastructure, and you can also subsidize certain goods, services, or housing options, if you end up with enough of a budget surplus.
Cities have more money at the start, but budgets can be trickier to balance.
For better, or for worse, the new progression mechanics also means that a city never stays in stasis. Since you'll be earning experience passively from the happiness of citizens, you're going to hit milestones whether you want to or not. In fact, Spiffing Brit had already shown prior to the game's release that it would be possible to get through all the milestones without growing your population at all!
The best idea from the worst SimCity
The new building upgrade system also requires some careful planning of the expansion of your city. If you hit your capacity for certain services like schools, healthcare, utilities, or so forth, you don't necessarily have to just plop another copy of a school, hospital, or power plant in your city. You now also have the option to upgrade or expand your existing schools, hospitals, power plants, and so forth. Most upgrades will simply increase the capacity or range of the service the building provides, but some buildings also have upgrades that give them entirely new functionality. These upgrades may also take the form of a "sub-building", which has to be placed adjacent to the main building, and which actually does increase the footprint of the building. So you need to take some time to familiarize yourself with the upgrade options for buildings, how much space they take up, and then leave enough space for future expansions.
Buildings can be upgraded to increase their capacity or provide additional functionality.
If you played the 2013 version of SimCity, then this will all sound familiar. While I really like that Skylines II allows me to improve and grow our existing infrastructure alongside the growing city (in fact, I explicitly asked for such a feature), I am disappointed that it isn't as expressive as SimCity's equivalent mechanic, and it's way less expressive than the original Cities: Skylines' analogous "Parklife areas" mechanic.
The sequel sadly doesn't allow players to place any decorative "props", as upgrades to buildings. We also don't have any props like the food trucks, benches, newspaper stands, or statues to create our own plazas, courtyards, or parks. We also can't build the large park areas or campuses like in the original expansions. The building upgrade system seems to have completely replaced this. But this system is extremely limited because there are only 1 or 2 upgrade options for most buildings, and sub-buildings must be directly adjacent to the main building. So you can't create a large plaza or quad for a university, and then place a library or dormitory on the opposite side of that plaza or quad. In fact, the university doesn't even have dormitory sub-buildings at all. If you want dorms for your students, you're best bet is to zone low-rent housing next to the university, and just accept that non-students will move into them.
Building upgrades are limited, such as colleges and universities not having dormitories.
Dirty industry
There's also a completely different system for specialized industry areas such as farms and mines, and it's kind of ugly. The central industry building has a circular area around it, in which you can draw an area similar to a district. Once the area is fully enclosed and active, random industry buildings will start spawning at random places inside. The player has no freedom whatsoever to place or customize the look of your specialized industry. If you don't like the placement of a particular building in the industry area, you can't even delete it and hope for a better building to spawn, because deleting any building in the area deletes the entire area. You also can't place paths or roads within the area, and must draw the industry area around any roads or paths.
Honestly, specialized industry areas look like they are made with place-holder assets. There are several different types of agriculture areas, including grain farms, vegetable farms, and livestock pastures. Yet they all use the same wheat texture. Vegetable farms don't look like corn fields or cabbage patches, and livestock pastures do not look like grassy fields full of cattle or pigs. And we also can't build other similar areas like orchards, vineyards, or pastures for beasts of burden like horses. Maybe that stuff will show up in an expansion? And while they're at it, I hope expansions completely redesign the way that these industry areas work.
Players have no control over the look of their specialized industry areas.
If I were in charge, I would prefer that building upgrades, parks, and industry areas be merged into a single mechanic. Buildings with sub-building upgrades available would have a circular radius around them, and the sub-buildings could be placed anywhere in that range. The various random buildings that pop up in specialized industry should also be ploppable sub-buildings that have their own functionality that further specializes or optimizes the industry area. Different buildings could have different ranges that would allow some larger infrastructure like universities, large parks, or specialized industry to fill-in intervening space with decorative roads, plazas, fields, or maybe even zoning
I'm planning on creating a video to explain (in more detail) my idea for how building upgrades and industry areas should work in Cities: Skylines II. I'll be sure to post it here when it's ready, so stay tuned!
COMING SOON: a video explaining how I would prefer building upgrades and industry to work.
Colossal Order also just missed a lot of seemingly-obvious opportunities for a wider variety of building upgrades and more expressive customization. For example, why not allow the player to add extension wings to an elementary school on one side or the other, instead of it always being on both sides? This way, you can have more different shapes and sizes of schools? Or how about a gymnasium that improves the health of students and also grants a small amount of recreation while they're at school? Or a cafeteria expansion that feeds the students and reduces their reliance on food stored at home? Or a pick-up / drop-off loop for school buses by the front of the school?
Or how about different university expansion wings for different fields of study? Like a school of law, or a school of engineering, or a school of medicine, which could provide bonuses to relevant industries or businesses or services in the city? Or dormitories that provide free or low-income housing for students while also increasing the student capacity of the university? Or a laboratory that increases the graduation rate and also buffs certain industries?
I'd also like to be able to upgrade parking garages to add an extra level or a basement level to support more cars. Or add EV charging stations. Or upgrade the garages with park 'n' ride bus stops and metro stations. Seriously, what parking garages have car washes built in to them? Is that a even thing?
And what about upgrades for parks? I'd like to be able to add amphitheaters, or gazebos, or picnic areas, or playgrounds to parks. Or add new rides to the water park.
There's so many things that could be added. A lot of this stuff would just be direct ports of content and assets that were included in the original expansions, so it wouldn't be that hard to figure out or implement.
I really miss the ability to toggle zoning on either side of a road [LEFT].
I also don't understand why Colossal Order didn't include the toggles for zoning on each side of roads. This was added late in the original Cities: Skylines' life, and I assumed that it was a proof of concept for the feature being included in the sequel. But it isn't here, even though roads have all kinds of other customization features and toggles. We can add or remove traffic lights, crosswalks, street lights, and so forth, so why can't we add or remove zoning? We also don't have the walls or fences that were in the original expansions, which means that controlling the placement and sizes of zoning can be a real pain in the ass. The only real way that we have to control zoning is by blocking zones with pedestrian paths (which is what I did in the early days of the original game). Thankfully, I can sometimes place a pedestrian path along a road to disable its zoning and make room for more zoning on an adjacent or parallel street, and then delete that path without the original zoning re-appearing. But it's a lot of tedious micro-management, and it doesn't always work.
We also can't create canals or proper quays. In fact, there's virtually no water infrastructure at all. We have cargo harbors, and passenger ferries, and that's pretty much it as far as coastal infrastructure goes. I haven't seen any fishing piers, or marinas, and there's definitely no aquaculture. Some of this stuff might be added, since the 2024 roadmap includes both a "Beach Properties Asset Pack" and a "Bridges & Ports Expansion". I'm not sure if the asset pack will be free, but I'm assuming that the Bridges & Ports expansion will be a paid DLC. Hopefully it will include some of the aquaculture concepts that were part of the Sunset Harbor expansion.
There is no proper support for quays or seawalls, but we can create makeshift ones with roads or paths
There are a few different techniques for creating makeshift quays by using the terraforming tools and the retaining walls of roads. But I would still like to have official support for proper quays, as well as some waterfront buildings and infrastructure to place along them.
Despite all of these omissions, I still don't think I would say that Cities: Skylines II feels "incomplete" or "unfinished". Yes, it's missing a lot of stuff that players of the original are used to having, but it's a new game, built on a new engine. And I personally think that it mostly makes up for these limitations with all of the new things that it's doing with its simulation and economy.
Big city problems
Aesthetics aside, the simulation is a lot more complex and models some real world socio-economic problems that have become much more common since the release of the first Cities: Skylines.
First and foremost, the age-old city-builder problem of managing traffic has some additional depth to it. Poor traffic management or extreme weather not only results in traffic jams (especially during rush hours), but vehicles can now crash into other vehicles and buildings. This can cause additional delays, as well as injuries or deaths, and even potentially damage to buildings that could result in the building collapsing if it is not properly maintained.
Poor traffic management or severe weather can result in wrecks on the roadways.
The production chain is a lot more complex, as industries and commercial zones actually produce and sell (respectively) specific categories of goods and services, and each household has a quota of how much of each category of good they need in order to maintain their quality of life. Industries don't just produce "raw materials" or generic "commercial goods", as was the case in the original game. The entire economy in the sequel works more akin to how the specialized industries in the original game's Industries expansion worked.
A zoned "furniture factory" in Cities: Skylines II actually produces furniture, using the wood produced by lumber industries (or imported from off the map), and sells that furniture to zoned "furniture stores", who sell them to citizens at retail for profit. Similarly, gas stations actually sell petrol, restaurants actually provide food services, hotels actually provide lodging for tourists, and so forth. And the profitability and sustainability of those businesses will depend on the availability of the resources or goods.
Industrial and commercial supply chains are more fully fleshed-out.
We don't get those annoying situations anymore where a commercial building pops up as a gas station asset, but is labeled as a restaurant or grocery store. If a commercial building looks like a gas station, then it is actually selling gas! Better yet, all the shops will have proper signage with the company name and what they sell.
This does (kind of) alleviate some of the issues I mentioned earlier with the lack of variety in the types of buildings and zones that the player can create, if you're willing to tolerate a lot of extra micro-management. While I can't explicitly zone leisure and tourism districts that will have hotels and nightclubs pop up automatically, I could micro-manage the look of my city by providing subsidies to desired businesses, and deleting buildings until I get the type of building that I want. If I want to create a make-shift tourism district around a tourist attraction, I can subsidize hotels and then delete the zoned buildings that appear until a hotel or motel pops up (which will actually provide lodging services to tourists). If I want a nightclub district, I can subsidize beverage services and entertainment, and then delete the zoned buildings until the desired bars, restaurants, gyms, or arcades start showing up.
With some micro-management, players can create specialized districts.
Further, if a business goes out of business, the underlying building remains intact, but vacant. It isn't demolished and replaced with a completely new building when a new business takes over. Instead, a business offering the same goods or services has to move into that building, unless the player specifically bulldozes the building to make room for another type of business that may be better suited to the area.
The citizens themselves are also modeled in more detail. A citizen's demographic and wealth level has more visible impacts on the game, and on the layout and character of your city. Different types of people or families will prefer different types of homes and have different needs. Families will look for low-density, detached houses, while teens moving out of their parents' homes will prefer cheap apartments closer to where they go to college or work. The cost of rent also scales based on the availability of houses, and the demand for different types of housing is based on the types of jobs that are available. Low-paying retail and service jobs will create more demand for high density or low-income housing, while higher-paying office and government jobs will increase the demand for lower-density housing.
This goes a little way towards more accurately modeling the real-world problems of housing availability and affordability. Citizens can become homeless (and businesses can go bankrupt) if they can't afford to pay the rent for their homes (or office space) for too long. To help out, the player can build a Welfare Office in the city, and we can even set tax sliders to negative values, which provides government subsidies to the relevant housing or business type(s).
Housing can become un-affordable, leaving citizens homeless and in need of welfare.
But we can't build homeless shelters, soup kitchens, or other wrap-around services.
Unfortunately, we can't provide additional services such as homeless shelters or soup kitchens for the homeless. Nor can we build half-way housing for recently-released convicts. And the game doesn't (as far as I know) model things like drug addiction or mental illness, so we also won't be building things like rehab clinics, needle exchanges, mental healthcare facilities, or things like that. In fact, the base game doesn't even include specialized elder car or child care. So there also aren't any retirement homes either.
Also, I couldn't find any charts or overlays that show the homeless population or highlight where they congregate on the map. So I never know how bad the homeless population is unless I start seeing tent villages in my parks. Even then, I don't necessarily know where would be the best place to build low-income apartments in order to best serve the homeless population.
Nevertheless, poverty and homelessness are some of the biggest real-world problems that cities face today, and players of the game now have to plan for and address them. Otherwise, your parks will literally start to fill up with tent villages or shanty towns.
The sequel also includes postal services and telecom as public utilities (as they should be). Residents will be unhappy, and businesses won't function efficiently, if they lack reliable broadband internet access. Those same internet towers will also serve as emergency warning systems in the event of one of the game's few disasters.
The most expensive game I've ever bought
I really like most of the changes that Colossal Order has made under the hood of Cities: Skylines II. The economy and simulation is much more complicated and detailed, and the road-building tools are a huge upgrade over un-modded original Skylines. Most (if not all) of my complaints come down to a lack of content and somewhat sloppy execution of a few mechanics. All of these complaints are things that can be addressed with patches, DLC, and eventually mods. The important thing is that the underlying game seems to be very solid, and Colossal Order seems to have planned ahead by including mechanics that could be used by future DLC or expansions (such as seasonal leisure).
Unfortunately, the increased depth of the simulation comes at a cost. This game has almost un-reasonably high minimum system specs. And when it says "minimum system specs", it really does mean "minimum". I tried installing and playing the game on my old gaming laptop and desktop PC. After modifying a .ini file to disable ray-tracing and volumetric clouds, I was able to get the game to run, but it was not really playable. It wouldn't render water at all, and every overlay caused all the terrain texture in the game to become solid black. And the framerate was really low to boot. Basically, if you don't have a graphics card that supports native ray-tracing and volumetric lighting, don't bother buying this game. And that's a shame, because it's going to cut out a lot of potential players, and could end up drastically hurting the game's sales and Colossal Order's financial stability.
I had to buy a whole new gaming laptop just to play the game. That probably makes Cities: Skylines II effectively the most expensive single game that I've ever bought. The cost of the new PC and the game tops even what I spent on Rock Band, with all its plastic guitars, drums, and hundreds of DLC songs. I'm not having as many of the technical and performance problems that other players are reporting, and so can't speak to those, but I had to spend a pretty penny to make that happen.
Citizens will pack up and move away if you can't keep them happy.