Cities: Skylines II

i put roughly 2.5k hours in cs1. i waited a long time to get cs2 and followed all the youtube content creators to see when the game is finally ready after its failed launch. im happy to report that its finally in good state and that i love it. i play heavily modded and im having a blast.

I want to write this review in two parts. The first is the game itself, the second being a brief discussion about the state of Paradox games and technical struggles I have faced running the game. Score: 6.5/10, Not worth the price (yet) Firstly, let me say that the game itself is rather fun when it works, which is supposedly a far cry from where it was at when it launched. I played for about 30 minutes at launch, and then returned it because it refused to run. I do have much better hardware now, so I will just say that if your PC is relatively recent and in the ~$1500 range, it should run things just fine. Graphically, it's not particularly impressive. Yes, if you zoom out, very many things render on screen, but it isn't like you are getting significantly more detail or texture quality than the last game. I personally don't care about this, but if you are considering buying the game now that it is fairly playable for a graphical upgrade, don't bother. Where I think the game shines is in realism of the infrastructure and of simulation. I played some of the first game, enough to see that without some rather hacky solutions, it was impossible to keep a large, dense area from falling completely apart. I was able to understand how to make a dense city center in this game well supplied and relatively traffic free, and I don't consider myself an expert by any means. I also think that progression works better in this game than the last one. If I recall correctly, getting new types of transportation and buildings happened when you reached certain population milestones in the last game, and in this one you earn XP based on citizen happiness and population growth. In theory, if you waited long enough, you could have everything unlocked with only 10k population, which is a nice change for people who want to build realistic, well connected cities that don't happen to be megacities. As for the bad, often placing tracks and roads is a real pain in the ass. I remember this in the first game, but not to the same extent. Sometimes adding a roundabout or new road will look perfectly reasonable but the game will refuse to do it, sometimes upgrading a road in a way that doesn't change the size or shape is impossible for no reason, and sometimes you can't place a building alongside a road for the same reason. When you build dense downtowns, that can be an immense issue. If you are a seasoned Cities Skylines player, you know you can download mods to fix these issues, just thought I would mention them for people interested in the vanilla game. My last point is that there is no difficulty mode you can choose that makes the game hard. It's a decently fun sandbox right now, but if you are looking for a challenge, there is literally none at all so long as you somewhat know what you are doing, which the tutorials make sure of. I have literally never lost despite making pretty impressive mistakes in the early game. Overall, I only partially regret my purchase, but I have had fun without getting mad at unfair gameplay mechanics. If you just want a review of the game itself, you can leave. If you want to know how the game runs on Linux continue reading. This game will absolutely devour your swapfile. For people new to Linux who have no clue what that is, it's basically an overflow for RAM that exists in your storage, at least if your system was set up correctly. Creating or changing the size of a swapfile is outside of the scope of a steam review, but you should be able to figure it out. I have mine set to 40GB now (which is unreasonably large for a single game) and I only crash sometimes when the game tries to autosave. There is also an annoying issue where the game will load as normal but in game, the graphics are terrible (despite being set higher) and it runs too poorly to be playable. I don't know how to solve this. I figured it was an issue with shader caching, so I cleared vulkan shaders and reinstalled them and it didn't do anything. I have had the issue a few times, and after coming back the next day, it is usually fixed, so either become smarter than me or use this happening as an excuse to actually go outside. Now, a note on modern Paradox and this game. I will start by saying I moved to this game from Victoria 3, which has been in an unplayable state for 3 months now. I have a scathing review of the game on my profile, so I won't go into too much detail. It's really unfortunate having systems and logistics autism because Paradox is the only company that makes games that scratch that itch. If you are just passively interested in games like this, please go play something else, because Paradox doesn't deserve your money at all ever again, and despite this game improving, it doesn't deserve your money for this one yet. I don't know all the details, but apparently things got so bad with Cities Skylines II that a new team had to take control of things, and they seem to be doing a fine job so far. I'm not sure how closely tied they are to Paradox itself, or how much creative control they have, but things have been moving in a positive direction. It's frankly a breath of fresh air reading patch note comments here and seeing positivity from people instead of negativity like in the Victoria 3 ones. If you are the kind of freak to put over 1000 hours into this game and build cities with multiple hundreds of thousands of people in them, you will get a kick out of this, especially if you buy it on sale. If you aren't, save your money.