An ambitious sequel, but the basic mechanics can’t compete with everything she wanted to do.
While the Original Cities: Skylines practically brought its kind of open city builder back from the dead (after SimCity smaked it in 2013), Cities: Skylines 2 is a sequel that often feels like it has taken more steps back than forward. It is full of exciting and enjoyable new mechanics to manage your economy and create more realistic metropolises. But it also asks you to do a lot if you don’t want the final product to look horrible when examined closely, sacrificing some of the usability of its predecessor to fit more bells and whistles. I’m not ready to demolish everything, but at the moment there is an unsightly matter of a city fire that requires major technical renovations to get rid of.
I’m going to spend a lot of time here criticizing Skylines 2, because it’s certainly disappointing considering what I expect from Colossal Order. But I must say in advance what Skylines 2 is not – and this is a bad game. It’s perfect for waiting. In a way, it’s really innovative and advances the Genre as a whole. I can recommend it quite easily as long as you meet its rather steep technical requirements. My Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 3080 were able to handle it correctly with only a few maximum parameters, even if the population of my cities numbered in the tens of thousands, but the developers themselves stressed that the optimization is still ongoing and that they will not achieve the benchmarks they hoped for on a variety of hardware until the end of
And I’ll get into more of what I think he’s doing right in a moment. But oh boy, there are a lot of unfortunate things to come first.
The house on the plain street
My biggest problem with Cities: Skylines 2 is that if you are not very careful about shaping the site in advance, your low-density commercial, industrial and residential properties will end up looking completely horrible. Dumpsters lean at impossible angles. Piles of wood float in the air or protrude into the ground. Parking lots that seem to have been painted on the side of a hill. It’s really not up to the standards of visual attention to detail that I would expect from an experienced Studio that has just launched the basics after a Home Run of a game of the same kind.
The fact that so many taller towers and skyscrapers look fantastic exacerbates this problem, because the care and fidelity shown encourages me to zoom in and see my city at street level. There is even a built-in film camera and a photo mode for this. The changing seasons can spoil you with beautiful autumn forests and snowy holiday wonders. Why would you bother to make this building so detailed and attractive, and then let the parking lot across the street look like something out of a painting by M. C. Escher.
Just to make sure I’m being fair, I reinstalled Skylines 1 and looked at some of my bumpier builds, and there were a few minor issues with the buildings clinging to the terrain. But at least the lots themselves still seemed to be level. The accessories on them pointed in the right direction. Building on hills could distort the surrounding terrain considerably, but it looks so much superior than what we have in Skylines 2 instead. I just can’t look at a loading dock leading directly to a slope into a Gaping abyss and call it an overall improvement.
In addition, the lower level of detail in Skylines 1 prevented me from examining everything closely. It was just adorable. And I’m starting to think that it might have some value. Maybe Skylines 2 ended up in some kind of strange middle-clbody valley.
KILLDOZER
The second big problem that arises from this is the predefined maps that come with Skylines 2, on which almost all of them have very little flat surface to build. Even the estuary, inspired by the real Shanghai, which should be quite flat. The terrain is totally disproportionate vertically, as if you multiply the height of everything to make it more dramatic at a glance, and much too hilly to house a modern megalopolis. That said, if you want to avoid these hideous properties, you need to do a great total of terraforming first. To be fair, country carving tools are easy to use and are free to move dirt, which is a consolation. And I guess once the community maps come out, some are made to be more “builder friendly”.”But at the moment, the planning of a new district requires so much classification and leveling that I found it to be a kind of cladding. I wanted a city management game and instead I got Bulldozer Simulator.