This first expansion for Cities Skylines II is a year overdue. Personally, I was far more optimistic about Cities Skylines II than most other players. Though my review of the vanilla game was biased by the fact that I never got any of my cities up over 100 thousand population, and so wasn't running into many of the problems that other players experienced with the simulation breaking down in large cities. I think my largest city was somewhere around 70-74 thousand population at the point that I published my review.
The game launched in such a messy state that Colossal Order had to devote so much time and effort to fixing core problems that they had to keep delaying the expansion. They were in a really hard position, as publisher Paradox had sold the expansion with the deluxe editions of the game in pre-orders. This content was promised to players, and was sold to players prior to the game launching. It's not like Colossal Order could just not release it.
This stuff is exactly why pre-order and "Deluxe Edition" cultures in gaming need to die. With all games being available digitally (and most games being purchased digitally), there is no risk of a supply shortage, and so no reason to ever pre-order a game. Offering pre-orders and pre-order bonuses is just a cynical, anti-consumer grift by publishers to try to get more money out of gamers. Sell the product before it's actually for sale, and know that you're guaranteed to get at least that many sales, even if the game turns out bad.
Colossal Order did say that, due to the delays, they tried to fit as much water-based content as they could into this expansion. They also claimed to have put a lot of time into fleshing out systems and testing the new content to make sure it all worked. I had hoped that this supposedly more holistic approach to this expansion, and the extra time given to it, would alleviate many of the complaints that I had with the first game's expansions being so limited in scope. I'm sorry to say that it didn't quite work out that way.
I'm also sorry to say that, while I was working on this review, Colossal Order and Paradox announced that Paradox has fired Colossal Order from its development duties on Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines II. After the end of this year, development of the game will shift to Paradox's in-house Iceflake Studios (the developer of Surviving The Aftermath). I had played Surviving the Aftermath. I thought it was fine, and largely had a good time with it, even though I never finished the campaign and never got around to reviewing it. So it's possible that Iceflake might handle Cities: Skylines II development just fine. But this situation sucks. Colossal Order created Cities: Skylines. It was their game (and series). For Paradox to yank it away from them in this blatant act of IP hoarding is just cruel, greedy, and evil.
I hope that Colossal Order survives, that they are able to retain most (if not all) of their staff through this, and that they come back swinging in a few years with a new city-building game that will rival Skylines. Maybe, in the long-term, competition between Paradox and Colossal Order (and maybe Citystate Metropolis?) will lead to a renaissance in modern city-building games, as each tries to out-do the other. But in the meantime, it's likely going to be a rough few years for Colossal Order, and I wish them all the best.
Repeating the first game's mistakes
The feature previews for the Bridges & Ports expansion sure seemed promising. New modular ports, bridges, drawbridges, proper quays and piers, a fishing industry, offshore oil drilling, waterfront zones, and a bunch of new parks and landmarks. It sure seemed like a fairly comprehensive and holistic feature suite, on paper.
But then I actually got to playing it, and almost immediately started to notice that there were things that I had hoped or expected to be included, which simply weren't. Despite the supposedly-holistic approach to water infrastructure, this expansion is still missing 2 key pieces of water recreation infrastructure that I've been asking for since the original Cities: Skylines over a decade ago. There are no public beaches, and no marinas. Yes, you can technically build a makeshift, superficial marina using the quays, piers, and a couple of boat props, along with any other Detailers' props or decorations. The piers do seem to provide some passive beautification, but nobody ever actually uses these structures that I might spend hours putting together. People don't walk the decks of the piers, or actually sail the prop boats out into the water. Would it really have been too much to ask to be able to create a simple seaway and "pleasure cruise area" for a marina, similar to the way that fishing areas are designated?
You can make makeshift marinas with quays, piers, and boat props, but nobody uses them.
The lack of public beaches really hurts the aesthetic of any coastal city. There are some props that can be placed on sandy beach areas to give some appearance of a beach. Maybe some tents here and there, some lawn chairs, and a few other such objects. But there are no beach towels, surf boards, sand castles, lifeguard towers, or things of that nature. Most importantly, just like with the makeshift marinas, nobody will ever actually go to that beach. People don't walk along the beach, swim in the water, sunbathe in the lawn chairs, or play in the sand. The beaches are just completely lifeless.
In the Detailers' debug prop menu, there is a tool for creating a "hangout area", which presumably designates a space for people to stand and hang out in. I've tried placing such hangout areas on my makeshift marina piers, beaches, and some custom courtyards and parks that I've made, but nobody ever seems to actually use them. I'm not sure what the problem is. Maybe I'm not using this tool correctly? Or maybe it's just broken? Or maybe it's not what I think it is? I don't know...
There's also other waterfront ploppables that are missing, such as all the restaurant piers and so forth that were included in the first game. There's also no way to create zoning along a pier, so we also can't create boardwalks with small commercial plots. This limits the creativity and variety that I can put into my coastal or riverfront cities.
In any case, I've been waiting for these sorts of infrastructure for so long, and I really did get my hopes up when Colossal Order announced that they were delaying the game in order to include all the water infrastructure they could think of. So it's doubly-disappointing to not see these things included ... again. They weren't in the original game's After Dark expansion, despite its tourism and leisure focus. They weren't in Parklife, despite it being about modular park infrastructure. They weren't in Sunset Harbor, despite it also being an expansion about water infrastructure and resources. And now they aren't in the sequel's Bridges and Ports expansion either.
Half an idea
I might have been able to overlook these omissions if the features that are included ended up being a home run. But I'm honestly not a big fan of how pretty much any of the new features work in actual practice.
Quays are perhaps the biggest offender here. On the one hand, it is nice to have this basic waterfront infrastructure in the game. The new quays sure are a hell of a lot easier to use than the old way of making custom quays with the cut-and-fill feature of roads and pedestrian paths. But they also have a lot of limitations. Limitations that were not limitations in the version of quays that were included in the first Cities: Skylines.
We can't build waterfront infrastructure directly on a quay?
First and foremost, you can't build infrastructure directly on quays. Fishing piers, ferry depots, ploppable harbors, water pumps, sewage drainage pipes, and so forth cannot be placed directly on a quay. If you want to place such infrastructure, you have to destroy a section of the quay, plop your infrastructure on the natural coastline, and then re-build the quay to try to get as close to the edge of the coastal ploppable as possible. This disrupts the aesthetic and adds a bunch of extra tedious construction and terraforming.
More generally speaking, quays just refuse to snap properly with your grids, and it's insanely difficult to line them up in clean grids. You can't simply place the quay on land, or in water, with the grid pattern and alignment that you want, and then raise or lower the terrain around or inside the quay. You have to try to terraform and flatten the coastline first. But since the terraform tool does not work in straight lines (or grids) either, things just don't line up. It's easy to spend an hour (or more) trying to make a single quay, and still never getting it to look the way you want. There's also no area-of-effect delete tool for removing clumps of trees and bushes that get submerged from terraforming.
Basically, think of all of the problems, nuisances, and nitpicks that you have with the base game's road-placement and grid zoning, and then dial them all up to 11. That's what placing a quay feels like every single time!
If you don't care too much about making perfect grids or maintaining road grades, then this likely won't be a problem, and the quays will work fine with little-to-no finagling. But if you do care about lining up grids and keeping realistic and consistent grades, then this will all be a tedious nightmare.
The first Cities Skylines allowed building on quays.
This stuff worked in the first Cities: Skylines, and looked better. Pier parks, ferry stations, ferry depots, drainage pipes, and so forth could all be built directly on a quay in the first Cities: Skylines. So why can't it be done here?! The only thing that can be attached to quays is the new piers. Worse still, Cities: Skylines II has less variety of quays than the original had. The multi-level quays with pedestrian paths are absent, for instance.
In the end, having native support for proper quays and piers is only marginally better than the old way of creating makeshift quays (with cut-and-fill roads) and piers (with roads and elevated pedestrian paths over the water).
Port goods; port bads
So how about one of the main features that's in the title of the expansion: the ports?
These are one of the better-working elements of the expansion. You place a main gate building, which creates a circular area in which you can place sub-buildings such as cranes, storage areas, worker amenities, and other structures. New sub-buildings are then unlocked by hitting arbitrary amounts of cumulative goods moving through the port. Sound familiar? If you played the first Cities: Skylines' expansions, then you probably should recognize this. For some reason, Colossal Order decided to make ports work the way that specialized industry areas worked in the Industries expansion of the first game. The only real difference is that the port area is constrained to a pre-defined radius, instead of being paintable by the player. Also, we do get to create our own freight routes within the port, which is an improvement over the first game's industries, which did not let us create internal transportation routes for moving raw materials or processed goods.
The expansion allows the construction of large, modular ports.
This is a particularly weird design decision, because Cities: Skylines II has its own progression mechanic already: the Development Points. So why aren't port upgrades tied to Development Points, the way all other upgrades in the game are?
Perhaps worse yet, a limitation of the first Cities: Skylines makes an appearance here too. The player cannot create shipping or ferry routes on water that is outside of the limits of the city. So if you want to link up 2 ports on opposite ends of the map (traveling through a snaky river or coastline or whatever), then you have to buy every single water tile in between, in order to create the route. Even with a single port built directly on the coast, facing an existing ocean shipping lane, you have to buy the water tiles in between in order to connect to outside shipping.
Thankfully, this problem isn't as game-breaking as it was in the first Cities: Skylines. Tiles in Cities: Skylines II aren't nearly as limited or restricted as they were in the first game. They are relatively smaller and cheaper than they were in the first game, and you can buy a lot more of them. I never felt like I was outright prevented from creating such routes; it was just far more expensive than it needed to be, and requires a mature city with lots of stable revenue to pay for the maintenance.
Shipping and ferry routes cannot be created outside of city limits.
Shifting back to the topic of upgrades and sub-buildings, the new fishing industry works the same as other specialized industry areas, except for one difference: there are a set of storage sub-buildings that can be placed in or near the fishing area. I wish that this was the way that all sub-buildings for specialized industries would work in the game. I also wish that it would have been back-ported to the vanilla specialized industries. It's a shame to already see Cities: Skylines II falling into the same pitfall of the first game, which is to not back-port new features or mechanics to legacy content. The vanilla specialized industries are ass-ugly with sub-buildings randomly and haphazardly placed, and they aren't functional to boot. If you're going to revert to the first game's Industries mechanics for the new ports, then why not go all-in and make the specialized industries work more like the first game's Industries mechanics too?
Other than these storage warehouses, the fishing industries have the same ugly, randomized placement of sub-buildings within their work areas. The ports, fishing industries, and vanilla specialized industries feel like place-holder alpha-build designs that were never replaced with a proper mechanic that belongs in this game. I just do not understand what the designers were thinking here!
Inland fisheries have the same ugly, randomized sub-building placement as vanilla specialized industries.
Water under the bridge
The other big feature of this expansion is the bridges -- specifically the drawbridges. These work pretty well and are probably the highlight of the expansion. First of all, this is something that is completely new. The first game did not have drawbridges. If you wanted a ferry or cargo route to run under a bridge, you just had to make sure that the bridge was tall enough. Now, we can build drawbridges that will open and close to allow ferry or vehicle traffic. There's also double-decker bridges and combined road and rail bridges, as well as pedestrian bridges.
These look nice and work very well. In my playtime with the expansion, I never had problems with them getting stuck and causing backups on either the water below or the road above. It all just worked!
Drawbridges work pretty well and look very nice!
If I have any complaints about the drawbridges, it's simply that I wish I had more control over the lane configuration of the drawbridge. All the drawbridges (and all bridges, for that matter) are pre-fab infrastructure that have a specific number of lanes and a direction. If I like the look of a 2-lane suspension bridge, but I want it to be a 3-lane suspension bridge with a median, well then I am out of luck. Similarly, if a bridge is a 1-way bridge, I can't make it a 2-way bridge or vice versa. This stuff is a shame, but it's not a deal-breaker.
These aesthetic complaints aside, the bridges and drawbridges allow for a lot of flexibility and variety in your city builds. You can build them high, or lower to the water level. They can be long or short. They can curve or change heights. It doesn't matter, and they will basically just work.
The real game-changer: bikes!
One of the surprising changes made in the expansion is that there seems to be a lot more cars, which makes traffic and parking much more difficult to manage, even for modestly-sized cities. At first, this bothered me, but then the bicycle patch came out like 3 weeks later (while I was still playing for review), and it all suddenly makes sense. My educated guess is that the increase in traffic was the result of changes made to the underlying simulation in order to facilitate the upcoming addition of bikes. Presumably, all those extra cars were people who wanted to get somewhere that would have been considered "walking distance" prior to the addition of bikes, but which was now too long to comfortably walk. But since bikes weren't technically available yet, all those trips were being made in cars, rather than in bikes, and even having buses didn't seem to lighten the car load much, since the buses were being filled by the people who were walking anyway.
Traffic was out-of-control at expansion launch, but the addition of bikes improved things dramatically.
But once the bike patch showed up, and I plopped down a large bike lane adjacent to my main arterials (along with some bike parking), the traffic rapidly began thinning out. In fact, one of the reasons that this review took so long is that I decided to start a second city in which I could utilize bike transit right from the start. This would allow me to see if I could avoid the traffic problems altogether, rather than having to retrofit bike infrastructure after the fact. I was also curious to load up a vanilla city and try making it more bike and ferry friendly, but I just didn't have time for that, given that I was still neck deep in Silent Hill f, and was also trying out the new Pirates expansion for Civilization VII, and also still playing football games.
Even though bikes alleviated some of the crazy traffic congestion, traffic and parking remained a significant issue in my new city. It seems that even with people using bikes (and adopting the "Encourage Biking" policy, which is the only new policy in this expansion!) there are just more cars on the roads than I remember seeing previously. As such, planning for smooth traffic flow, and leaving space for parking (including the new roadside parking options) is much more important than it used to be.
While the biking update is mostly comprehensive and robust, with the inclusion of new bike paths, bike bridges, multiple bike parking options, and a new bike policy, it is still missing one thing: there are no bike drawbridges to use alongside the other "Bridges & Ports" drawbridges. To be fair, bicyclists will use regular pedestrian paths, including the new pedestrian drawbridges, so it isn't like there are no options to get bikes over ferry ways, shipping lanes, or canals. But it still seems like a frustrating oversight by Colossal Order that continues to show the same limitations of the original game's expansions.
Uncertain future
And all of these limitations with the actual expansion content are compounded by lingering issues with the underlying gameplay and simulation. Zoning in clean grids is still harder than it needs to be, with roads occasionally getting slightly offset. Citizens will still funnel down congested streets instead of finding alternate routes. Commercial demand drops to zero after just a few 10's of thousands of population and never seems to go back up (even with low taxes). I never have enough elementary schools, while only a few high schools and colleges can support an entire city. And things like death waves still happen annoyingly frequently, and cover the entire city with annoying hearse icons. And why are there so many damn tornadoes?! Would it kill them to add some different disasters?
Things like frequent death waves and inexplicably low commercial demand still plague the underlying game.
Fans have been pretty upset with Colossal Order since Cities: Skylines II's release, and it seems like publisher Paradox has lost patience with them as well. This expansion was delayed a whole year, and yet is still underwhelming. It's lacking features, and some of the features that are here just don't work very well and are difficult to use. Of course, it's impossible for us to know if the game's problems are the result of ineptitude from Colossal Order, or if it's the result of Paradox making unreasonable demands for release dates and DLC schedules.
I don't know what Skylines' new developer will be able to accomplish. It seems likely that Paradox will take more control, and will likely push out a more aggressive slate of paid DLCs (which is their modus operandi). In fact, that may have already started, with Paradox releasing 2 new paid content creator packs. The Supply Chains DLC looks interesting, but I don't want to pay $8 for it. If it (and the Skyscrapers pack) go on sale for 50 or 75%, I might buy them. But right now, I'm not spending $16 for a few extra buildings and no new game mechanics. Not happening! In any case, this review almost feels like a eulogy for Cities: Skylines.
I hope that Colossal Order lands back on its feet. Perhaps in a few years, they'll release a new city-building game that will combine the best ideas from the first Skylines with the best ideas from the second Skylines, and compete with whatever Paradox is doing with the Cities: Skylines name. For now though, Cities: Skylines II, even with its new "Bridges & Ports" DLC, remains an enjoyable, but underwhelming game.
Despite ferries, this scenic island lighthouse won't be self-sufficient because it will still need
electricity, sewage, garbage, and emergency service access from the mainland.