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Cities: Skylines II still feels like a beta, and that bums me out a lot

4K View2023-10-20

Cities: Skylines II

7.6

StrategySingleplayerBuildingSimulationCity Builder

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SHOULD I PLAY CITIES: SKYLINES II?

As much as it pains me to say this, you should skip Cities: Skylines II, at least for the time being. Developer Colossal Order has built in a bunch of fantastic new ideas into its highly anticipated follow-up to the original Cities: Skylines, but the game is nowhere near ready for a full-fledged release in its current state. Bugs, performance issues, and half-implemented design concepts hold back every aspect of the game right now, and that’s especially frustrating now that I’ve played long enough to experiment with some of the awesome new features Cities: Skylines II brings to the table.

TIME PLAYED:

I’ve played ten hours of Cities: Skylines II, split across three cities I started on three different maps: “Barrier Island,” “River Delta,” and “Sweeping Plains.” I built each city up to at least the “Boom Town” stage, experimented with the new mass transit systems, built several specialized industries, and laid down lots and lots of roads. Over the course of that time, some things (which I’ll talk about more below) that annoyed me initially became less prominent, but others remained constant aggravations throughout my time with the game.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT CITIES: SKYLINES II?

• The new roads are wonderful. Colossal Order has paid close attention to the Cities: Skylines modding community over the years, and they incorporated many of the most popular mods into Cities: Skylines II as core features. By default, I saw a readout of each angle on a new street as I was positioning it, so I could be sure my angles were square when that was important. Roads are extremely cheap now too, so it was much easier to grid out new areas and create a visual plan for my city. Combined with the fact that landscaping is now free, I felt I had a lot more ability to look ahead to my medium- and long-term goals for my towns.

Another great addition to roads is the fact that almost all of them carry electricity and plumbing automatically, so there was no need to “paint” water and sewer coverage under my cities—those grids grew right alongside my towns, and I just had to make sure my electricity and water supplies were up to the task of keeping everyone supplied.

• Interesting new zoning options. Cities: Skylines II gave me more control over zoning than I’ve ever had in a city-builder, with new mixed-use zones and the option to pick between North American and European style housing. In residential areas, I could pick from low-density, single-family housing to medium-density row houses and condos, up through large apartment towers with commercial spaces at street level. There was also a new office space zone type for white collar workers, and I found it easy to site and set up industries like livestock farms and aggregate quarries.

The ease with which I could rezone existing areas allowed my cities to come alive in ways I never really saw in the first Cities: Skylines. As my population grew, property close to the city center became more valuable. I increased the housing density in those areas—all it takes is a quick right-click to de-zone an area—while adding new low-density housing zones on the outskirts of town, mapping out new developments and neighborhoods. I was able to (mostly) keep my road network up to the task with the “replace” tool, which allowed me to easily upgrade roads from two-lanes to three- and four-lane thoroughfares.

• Upgradeable facilities. Many of the city service and utility buildings available in Cities: Skylines II can be upgraded in multiple ways. I could upgrade my clinics, for example, with an additional wing or extra garage space to handle additional ambulances. Some of these expanded the original building footprint, while others were housed inside, but either way, they changed—and usually enhanced—the building’s service capacity. I thought this was a cool way to expand options for providing essential services like education, health care, and safety.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT CITIES: SKYLINES II?

• A woefully bad tutorial system. Someday I would like to find the person who went around to every developer of enterprise software and convinced them all to introduce new features through disruptive little word bubble “tours” that I have to now click through before proceeding with the task I wanted to do, because I believe this person should be forced to answer for their crimes. Cities: Skylines II has adopted this system for all of its many, many tutorials, and I hated it every time one popped up.

When I misclicked and accidentally opened the panel for bus management, I suddenly was staring at a twelve-slide sequence of explanatory text. I could either stop what I was doing (which was not remotely related to buses) or dismiss the tutorial forever, potentially missing valuable information I’d need when the time came to set up my public transportation system. Cities: Skylines II doles out all of its tutorial information in this format, abandoning the guiding design principle of “show, don’t tell.”

• Deafening visual noise. To Cities: Skylines II’s great credit, there’s a lot of data available, because it’s a much more detailed simulation than the previous game was. However, it does not do a very good job of presenting that information in many cases, and the menu and overlay designs leave much to be desired. By default, placing buildings shifted the view to a transparent mode that highlighted favorable street locations, but this made everything else disappear. I couldn’t see what neighborhood I was working in or any nearby landmarks while in this view. I had to constantly flip back and forth between visualization modes to find a good site for each building, and meanwhile, icons that showed road and power connections on the floating building overlapped and just became visual clutter.

• Lots that defy the laws of physics. Rather than create perfectly level lots each time a structure spawns, Cities: Skylines II tries to split the difference between terraforming and going with the lay of the land. The results are frequently messy, with backyards that droop down hills as if they were part of a Salvador Dalí painting. This was pretty jarring to see, and even with this effort to contour lots to the existing topography, I still wound up with loads of annoying little dirt cliffs in my towns. It turned out that I had to do quite a bit of manual leveling, even where the ground looked pretty even.

• Obnoxious radio hosts. Cities: Skylines II has three in-game radio stations, and one of them features spoken word segments that are spoofs of real-world radio programming. I hated them. They’re hammy, unfunny, and repetitive. This would normally have been something I was content to ignore; I’d just switch to one of the ambient music stations, turn off the fake ads, and forget about it. It became a bigger problem, though, because Cities: Skylines II did not save my selection; I had to open the music menu and switch the annoying hosts off every time I loaded my save.

• It lacks optimization and polish. I’ll be frank: Cities: Skylines II felt like an early beta during my time with the review build, and a big part of that was down to its woefully poor performance on my PC, which is equipped with a pretty powerful processor and a current-gen RTX 4070ti graphics card. I got acceptable performance after turning the game’s “level of detail” setting down to “very low,” which meant putting up with jarring pop-in on all of the map’s vegetation.

Cities: Skylines II is certainly much more detailed than Cities: Skylines, but I wouldn’t say that it looks any better most of the time, and it frequently looks significantly worse. In the build I played, the charming tilt-shift blur effect that made the original look like a model railroad kit simply didn’t work at first, and when an update arrived that allowed me to use it, it looked so sloppy that I immediately turned it back off. Anti-aliasing also seems to either be malfunctioning or poorly implemented, as almost every option left me with shimmering “jaggies” along most edges and in any tight patterns on screen.

It’s frustrating and extremely disappointing to see Cities: Skylines II arrive in this state, because there are so many exciting new ideas and upgrades over the original. It’s a game that I want to keep playing, but I’m going to wait until it’s closer to feeling like a finished product. At the moment, it absolutely does not.

💬 Are you going to be putting on your civil engineering hat and jumping into Cities: Skylines II, or will you be waiting for a few patches to roll out? Let me know what you think in the comments.