I tried this game 6 months after it first came out to give it a chance to have any hotfixes and patches sorted out before so that it was the best possible chance for it to impress me - it was in a pretty sorry state
2 years later I've come back again to see if they've fixed most (if not all) of the issues with it, and to see if it was up to the standard of Cities 1 and to be honest, I don't know what they've done for the last 2 years other than maybe add new assets to the game, the core game is still a broken mess
- There are still no premade roundabouts, so unless you want to make a boring grid city, you have to spend most of your time perfectly tweaking everything to make it sit properly
- Everything still violently snaps to the terrain, including underground placement, bridge heights and anything that has any interaction with the camera, meaning that if your city has any terrain deviation, especially if it's cliffs/large drops, you'll find yourself wanting to throw up all the time, if you can even navigate it at all
- Bridge heights themselves are capped at a certain level unless you add a massive pillar of dirt, then suddenly the sky is the limit, or rather, the dirt pillar
- The UI is still bright, garish and incredibly hard to parse at a glance, especially when trying to zone, everything is just bright green and short of looking at the building architecture style, it's near impossible to tell what's already zoned where
- Objects still "overlapp" other random objects that have no correlation to the object you're trying to place - You try to move a building and it tells you it's not possible because it overlapps a piece of road a kilometre away, for some reason
- Pedestrians completely ignore road markings and just do what they want (I had this issue with cars the first time around and while I didn't specifically test it this time, I have no reason to think that would be fixed this time if the pedestrians had the same issue)
- More of a personal thing, but having metro stations require subway yards now is incredibly annoying when trying to design a nice clean, concise city, especially since you can't put the subway yards underground (to my knowledge)
- The performance still leaves a lot to be desired - I have a fairly middle of the range PC that should handle it just fine but it constantly hangs and freezes, even on the lowest settings
- Why oh why did they remove the zoning brush? - Genuinely, what possible benefit is there to having to only use the marquee tool, the fill bucket or the single square brush?
One of the best things about Cities: Skylines was always the fact that you could build cities that weren't just grid cities, you could make free flowing, natural cities with curves, but now you're punished for doing that because you have to awkwardly go around with the fill bucket, filling out the zoning whenever you do a new area, it makes no sense that it was removed in the sequel
I know this is a big, possibly ranty review, and a number of these things might not bother you at all, but it's just so disappointing from the people who brought us one of the greatest city builders in the history of gaming, to follow up with this, and that's the crux of the problem.
It's not that any of these things are necessarily the end of the world or that they make it completely unplayable, but they're mostly large, structural issues with the game that weren't an issue in the first game, haven't been addressed at all, and make the whole thing just a worse experience than the first game, some of which feel like they would be the quickest and easiest solves to implement.
Cities: Skylines 2 isn't bad, but when I know a similar game already exists and does most things better already, there's no way I can recommend it, just get Cities 1 and if you need the few upgrades that Cities 2 actually introduces, just get a few mods - oh that's another thing, you can just use Steam Workshop in Cities 1, Cities 2 forces you into their propriatry "Paradox mods" system instead and it works okay, but it is still worse and more annoying than just using the Steam Workshop like Cities 1 did
