Cities: Skylines 2 Review in Progress

thesixthaxis.com:

While it’s less common to see these days, there’s countless instances throughout history of people simply deciding to up sticks and not just move to another town or city, but actually go and found a brand new one. It might well be time to do exactly that for city builder fans, leaving of a game that’s eight years old, and jumping across to the shiny new development and greener pastures of Cities: Skylines 2. It’s a sequel that comes with a lot of mod cons built in from the start, but will old hands miss some of the creature comforts of DLC left behind?

The fear whenever a long-running game with countless expansions is superseded by a sequel is that the developers are going to take back all of their toys and force you to buy them all over again. That’s absolutely not the case with Cities: Skylines 2. Compared to the original’s base game, Skylines 2 comes with half a dozen expansion-worth of gameplay features built in on day one. There’s the night and day cycle, there’s seasons, there’s broad public transport options, there’s natural disasters, and more. Yes, there’s plenty of areas where they can expand and refine, but the base game already feels pretty complete.

However, Colossal Order has hit the reset button in other places, and expanded in others with new ideas. One of the key overhauls has come with the progression system. Before this was just a straight up progression as your village grew to a town and then a bustling city, each growth point marking a population milestone. Population still matters here, but it’s now part of a broader experience system that grows alongside their happiness, and actively improving the city infrastructure, all netting you varying amounts of XP. As you hit a milestone, you might then