"An Enjoyably Intricate City Planning Game" - Cities: Skylines 2 Review

screenrant.com:

has a lot to live up to as a sequel to one of the best city-building games around. Although it doesn't have the benefit of all the DLC and mods yet, it is still off to an excellent start. Developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, the simulation game is a beautiful work of art with impressive graphics, fun radio stations, and an incredible array of tools for customizing and building cities. Clean and useful tutorials help make it not overwhelming despite the plethora of options in this very intricate game.

Making a sequel to a city-building simulation game offers many different ways that it can be approached and from the looks of things, the developers wanted to improve as much as they could. From the intricate details of connecting roads in ways that are manageable and look good, to making each map an enormous sandbox of tiles to work with, has stayed true to its original while becoming an enjoyably intricate example of a city planning game.

For a game with many complex details to manage, the short tutorials and helpful hints that has incorporated are masterfully done to keep it from being overwhelming or oppressive. Once deep in the game, many improvements are noticeable such as the addition of being able to upgrade Service buildings rather than replacing them by adding onto the existing structures and the helpful feature of importing electricity from invisible neighboring cities. The inclusion of being able to build farms and set their boundaries far from the noisy city was a very pleasing feeling as well.

gives each city a much larger playable area than the original game had to work with, five times larger in fact. Each individual map tile may be a bit smaller, but there are 441 tiles overall,