Cities: Skylines 2 does the brain good
The original Cities: Skylineswas a much-needed Band-Aid over the gaping wound that the collapse of the SimCitybrand had left in the gaming world. We, the gamers — we want to build weird little cities. We want to make dense urban corridors and industrial havens, vast tracts of tree farms and bridges to nowhere. The gamer’s urge in this genre is strong, and Cities: Skylines deftly covered that need in 2015, allowing me and many others to have hundreds of hours of fiddly fun, creating sweeping highway networks and furiously clicking to figure out why this one intersection is having such terrible traffic problems.
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Cities: Skylines 2 is mostly a test to see if developer Colossal Order can deliver on the promise of “fiddly city builder” yet again, in a time when the “SimCity-ish” genre might be less crowded but the more broad “city builder” category certainly is. 2023 offers us a lot of pathways to express ourselves by making systems and simulations, and the splash that the original Skylines made is slightly less intense in a moment where I can’t swing a stick without hitting a game that wants me to plot a building or two down on a map.
The good news is that Skylines 2 hits all the markers. It develops the systems of the previous game in substantive ways, offering many different methods for crafting the space of the city for your own design needs. The road creation system offers a full suite of options to curve, place, align, and organize any kind of city system that you would like, and nearly all the other systems in the game derive from that. If you build it, Skylines suggests, you can make it work.
The most notable part of Skylines 2 might be just that: You can delve into its complex systems of transit and zoning
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