Cities: Skylines 2 Review

ign.com:

While the original Cities: Skylines practically brought its breed of open-ended city builder back from the dead (after SimCity 2013 killed it), Cities: Skylines 2 is a sequel that often feels like it took more steps back than it did forward. It's full of exciting and gratifying new mechanics for managing your economy and creating more realistic metropolises. But it also asks you to do a lot of busywork if you don't want the end product to look horrendous on close inspection, and sacrifices some of the user friendliness of its predecessor to fit in more bells and whistles. I’m not ready to tear it all down, but right now there’s an unsightly case of urban blight that’s going to take some major technical renovations to clear up.

I'm going to spend a lot of time criticizing Skylines 2 here, because it is certainly disappointing given what I've come to expect from Colossal Order. But I do need to say up front what Skylines 2 is not – and that's a bad game. It's perfectly serviceable. In some ways it's genuinely innovative and pushes the entire genre forward. I can recommend it pretty easily, as long as you meet its fairly steep technical requirements. My Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 3080 were able to handle it okay on just shy of max settings, even as my cities’ populations were getting into the tens of thousands, but the devs themselves have cautioned that optimization is still a work in progress and they won't hit the benchmarks they were hoping for on a wide variety of hardware by launch.

And I'll get into more of what I think it does right in a bit. But oh boy, there is a lot of unfortunate stuff to get through first.

THE HOUSE ON UGLY STREET

My single biggest issue with Cities: Skylines 2 is that, if you're not extremely