Cities: Skylines II Review – The SimCity Curse

Cities: Skylines was an excellent city-builder, released to great fanfare and one that took more than a few jabs at the undeniable failure of SimCity. Released in 2015, the original has been padded to the seams with DLC; the only one we reviewed was the Natural Disasters DLC, but this all fits into an issue that is plaguing the sequel – if you compare it to the original when it was released, Colossal Order has come on leaps and bounds. Compare it to the one you can play now, and there are issues. It’s impossible not to compare it to what you can play now, which hurts Cities: Skylines II.

First things first, you all no doubt know that Colossal Order told everybody that the game would be launching with a few issues. I’m pretty fortunate in that I haven’t noticed the majority of these, thanks to a recent upgrade to my rig. However, even with this, there are times when the game has had a bit of a slowdown. I have also had a few crashes, but for the most part, my time with Cities: Skylines II has been good – apart from one crash which cost me hours of city-building.

While looking at the negatives, we go back to the impossibility of not comparing with Cities: Skylines. This second outing feels lacking in city development when you get bigger. There are no stadia to act as that focal point, with arguably the best tourist attraction being an old castle. I do not doubt that Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive will go the same route as the original. The game will be packed to the gills with DLC eventually, but this leaves the base game looking very thin on the ground, even if much of the DLC has been incorporated in one way or another.

This thinning, similar to Steven Seagal’s hair before the merkin was implanted, is also found in other aspects of Cities: Skylines II. One example is with the districts; the options are also pretty thin. Gone are the options around “no highrise”. Gone are the abilities to specialise industrial districts – though now you build a farm, oil… plantation, or whatever other of the handful of industries and create a border as to how far they reach.

It feels limiting because it is limiting. Progression through the game is more straightforward, and I prefer it, but it’s also not as organic. In the first game, progression was based on population. Here, it’s XP-based. XP can be farmed with money by putting down certain buildings, selling them, and putting them back down. You lose money, but if you have it, the XP is there for you to gain. The progression trees also feel a little limiting, though again, it’s down to a comparison of a game that had many years of DLC compared to this launch title. It’s hard not to miss the ability to create a tourist area and other finer aspects the original brought to the table (eventually).

Adding to this, Cities: Skylines II feels just a bit lifeless. I put a park down, and nobody is playing in it. My high school gets a sports field extension (American, despite me using the European set), and there are never any games. Emergency services don’t seem to be doing their jobs now. Sure, the fire gets put out, but the actual action of putting it out is gone. These may seem small, but they did help set Cities: Skylines apart. The micro part of the simulation appears to be primarily cut back, but the macro does help to compensate.

Where some of the simulation seems to have been lost in the actual action of your city’s inhabitants, Colossal Order looks to have increased the simulation in parts of the city management and some of the more significant details, such as city planning. A great example is how wind works; the map will show the direction and speed of wind (granted, this never changes), which has a significant impact on where air pollution will travel from your industrial zones, as well as where you can place wind turbines for energy. Planning where things are in your city feels more critical here than in the first, considering pollution, traffic, and links to what a structure will need. Yes, workers need to travel to work, but more important is getting the supplies from industry to retail or your cargo station or harbour.

It’s these links that stand Cities: Skylines II out. This is also what I mean by the macro. The grander elements of simulation, such as how parts of the city link together economically – from how people travel around, how this travel impacts the best place to put commercial properties, and more – to your economy as a whole are well done. Here, you can delve into your tax revenues, adjusting as and how you like, revenue gained from exporting, and on the counterpart, your expenditure on services.

Linked to this economy is how resources are presented in the game. As mentioned earlier, you can no longer specialise your industrial zones; what you can do is put down a specific industrial unit, snapping the borders of its area and watch oil pumps or farm buildings pop up. You want to place these on the resources, of course, and you’ll often find these resources a fair distance from your central city, with the new tile system fully supporting this feel of you developing a region, more than a single city.

One of the mods I used most in the first Cities: Skylines enabled me to unlock far more of the map. I always felt that while it was still huge, there was a lot of space that could be used. Colossal Order has gone right for this, with the tiles being smaller, but there are so many to unlock that you’ll have more land to expand into than you know what to do with. This certainly helps when you consider the features like air pollution previously mentioned, as I’m not exactly fond of creating a game version of Shanghai or early London, the smog hanging so thick that people are simply dying. It takes its toll on my ambulances and hearses.

Before I wrap up, I want to talk about arguably the biggest improvement made to Cities: Skylines II, and that’s roads. Planning your city is much easier thanks to a more robust road-building system and what comes with these roads. First and foremost, water, sewage, and power are transported via roads (regular roads, not highways), with pipes and cables being there automatically with the road itself. It makes for a far more understandable and efficient system and helps with development.

Another upgrade I’d like to point out first is that almost all service buildings, from Schools to Hospitals, Taxi Depots to Subway Stations, have additional upgrades that can be bought. Some of these will occupy the same space as the current structure; others will need to be fitted onto the edge of the current one. It makes for a far more realistic way these buildings work and a more reasonable update than a brand-new building as your city develops.

Still, despite these improvements, I can’t help but think that for every new – and these can be major – improvement in Cities: Skylines II, at least ten or so smaller things have been cut, likely left for future DLC. It can feel disappointing, but I also must keep saying that these features I’m thinking of were not in the base release; these are from close to a decade of DLC (both free and paid). While it is noticeable, there’s still no doubt in my mind that this is a good game and one that will almost certainly get better as time goes on.

Copy provided by the publisher.

Cities: Skylines 2 is a very good city builder with a few marked improvements over its predecessor and is huge in scale. It is, however, let down in (arguably unfair) comparison with the original due to the countless free content (and paid DLC) that went into that, making this feel comparatively light.

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