Cities: Skylines II

💥 "Optimization" means I can’t even open the game anymore — brilliant work! I saw the latest update and thought, “Finally, they fixed something!” Guess what? They did. They fixed my ability to enter the game. Launch? Black screen, crash. Load save? If you're lucky enough to get there, enjoy 15 seconds before a spontaneous game vanishing act. 100-hour city? Now a digital fossil, left behind in the ruins of this so-called “update.” Seriously, this isn’t optimization — it’s digital exile. The game now runs so smoothly, it skips the whole “running” part entirely. They said they improved CPU threading. Yeah, I can see that. My CPU's working overtime — not to run the game, but to write my obituary in Task Manager. 🔧 Bug fixing? Nope, just bug relocation — from the UI to the bootloader. 📉 Performance? So stable now, it flatlines before it even starts. 🧠 AI pathfinding? Still lost — just like my faith in this development team. 🪦 Final thoughts: Thank you, devs, for optimizing me out of my own game. It’s bold, it’s visionary, and it’s probably the first time a patch note doubled as a restraining order. If you're a new player — don't worry about stutters or frame drops. You might never get far enough to experience them.

This is early access. If you expected a complete and polished game, this is not it. I've sunk 5000 hours into CS1 and it's my favorite game ever. So naturally, I couldn't wait for CS2 to release. In hindsight, the release should have been pushed back a few years. I know nobody would've liked that, but right now it's missing too much for me to enjoy. I'm an asset modder for Cities Skylines 1 and I was anticipating the new asset editor of Cities Skylines 2 along with the improvements and unfathomable new opportunities that would come with it. The asset editor has been pushed back to probably 2026 given the recent statements from CO. I've admired their close relationship to the (modding) community and when they announced those modding improvements for the second game, I was stoked! The game is playable, yes. But it's missing so many features you've come to expect in CS1. There are no bicycles at all and transport options in general are limited. I'm well aware that CS1 didn't start out as complete and polished either, but after 10 years, standards for what to expect from a city builder of this size have risen and it's frankly disappointing that CS2 didn't start out as strong as it could have been. Right now it's more delays, delays, delays and I'm not saying they shouldn't take their time. Absolutely they should take the time to make this game the best it can possibly be. I'm sure CO will deliver a great city builder eventually, I absolutely believe in their abilities and ideas. But the time has not yet come.

I am a diehard Cities player, with 10,000 plus hours dedicated to cities 1 and 2000 plus hours logged in cities 2. After the last patch update, I am now abandoning the game. I paid 100 plus dollars at release, only to not be able to play the game for more than an entire year, I then spend 3 grand on a new system (entirely just to play this game!), and then was plagued by stupid gameplay bugs, breaking save files, and at least the game was playable although glitchy. Now, a delayed update is forced upon me, I find that the game is entirely broken and unplayable (AGAIN URGHHH). I am calling time of death on this. I am sick an tired of 7 years of self-troubleshooting, repairing, an fixing my own game just to play a sub-par experience because of the bugs. I hate paying the money I do just to have to fix sh*t myself. Im done. See ya paradox, its been a good ride.

The new modding system, Paradox Mods, is a massive letdown compared to the original’s Steam Workshop. The Workshop was seamless, community-driven, and easy to use, while Paradox Mods is clunky, unreliable, and a hassle to navigate, often requiring multiple restarts. Paradox’s attempt to control the modding ecosystem feels like a greedy misstep—why reinvent the wheel so poorly instead of building a Workshop-like platform for other platforms? It’s a frustrating downgrade that taints an otherwise promising game.

My relatively terrible laptop can actually run this at medium graphics, and the city building aspect is second to none. Just waiting for custom assets to bring this to the next level. Additionally, the game could benefit from more road types and sizes.

Buggy and unplayable at the moment, they released the Quay update, which completely broke the game, and instead of fixing the bugs, they gave us a "guide" on how to fix it, which does not work.

Cant even load in, lost a 30k city because of this most recent update. I love this game but I can't in good conscience recommend it in its current state.

It pains me to give this game a negative rating as I have been a huge fan of the franchise since 2015. I have more than 9,000 hours in Cities 1, and was extensively modded. Cities 2 has its charms and scant strong points, but are overshadowed by its plethora of failings and shortcomings. It's such a massive disappointment. 2 years in: - No Steam Workshop modding support. - No finished asset creator for modders. - No bicycles in the traffic simulation. - No monorail. - Not able to roll back game version. - Every time Colossal Order updates the game, they cause game-breaking crashes and freezes. This latest patch caused a critical error right in the start menu. Since you cannot access the game mods without access to the main menu, you have to play 4D chess with your own game to make it run again. In Cities 1, you were able to go into the Steam Workshop and disable the broken mods after every patch, then enable them again after the modders fixed it. It took time troubleshooting, but you could still have a playable game. - The developer team is not responsive enough to update their game. They take multi-month long vacations at critical times and leave players to simmer in their unfinished mess. At this point you would have a better experience playing Cities 1, or even Sim City 4 with mods.

After pushing through 1300 hours of bugs, glitches and very hard BSOD crashes, I can't continue on. The latest update 1.3.3f1 on 6/11/25 completely killed the game for a lot of us. The game no longer loads with our saves at all. You either get a blurry ocean background or a black screen that hangs indefinitely. It has been 48 hours now with no acknowledgement from CO. While my play time has been relatively fun, I can NOT recommend this game anymore and will move on to something else. The lack of communication, persistent bugs/crashes, very slow updates and now the fact that the game doesn't even run anymore has killed the mood.

There has been so much improvement since the game released and at nearly 1,000 hours of game play, this game allows for some much creativity! It is so much fun to play and I highly recommend giving it a try if you enjoyed CS1. It's gorgeous and I can't wait to see how it continues to improve.

kinda regret pre-ordering this. two years in, still no actual expansions. performance is hell. paradox mod is worse. game-breaking bugs. you'll have a 500k pop city that has more than 100 attractiveness but only has 50-100 tourists. firefighters don't even have extinguishing animations. this game is extremely forgettable after purchasing.

I have been defending this game and the devs since launch day. No more. The latest Quays and Piers brought me back to the game. Unfortunately, 1 day later and I cannot even launch. I've had enough. Goodbye CSII.

This game has great features that makes it difficult to go back to Cities 1. Building roads has never been easier and it's so fun to do. However, I cannot recommend this game in this state. The cavalier disregard of the playerbase is crazy with months and months of time between posts and patches or...ANY information whatsoever. I understand the dev team does not need to keep posting and giving us more and more broken promises, but keeping us in the loop/in the know is a better strategy than keeping us in the dark - especially when faith in your product is fading. This game released in October of 2023 and yes, it has gotten marginally better, however we still do not have the notorious Asset Editor, and they're going to try to peddle a DLC in the near future (if it doesnt't get delayed..AGAIN). PDX Mods has caused me personally so many errors, bugs, & crashes, that I honestly miss the robust design of the Steam Workshop. It was perfect for Cities 1 and virtually any other game that utilizes it. You have to go in your game to resolve mod conflicts that churn out thousands of error pop-ups and unless you have an auto-clicker you will actually want to rip your hair out and close the game in frustration before you can even troubleshoot what is actually happening. I cannot entirely blame the dev team for that, though, as they have little control over modding - but it is a note of frustration that many others have shared elsewhere. AN HONORABLE MENTION, but let us not forget about the Traffic mod incident on PDX Mods as well. Part of me wants to say I enjoy this game, because I do. My playtime is a testament of that. Will I play it again? Possibly. Especially when they roll out updates for us. Would I buy it again if I had to (knowing all of this?) No, absolutely not. In fact I wish I could get a refund as this is not the game I was expecting to have - but it is far too late for that. With a little more communication from either Paradox or C.O. I think I would have a lot more respect and understanding for the state that the game is in, however, we have been left in the dark for far too long and it just feels absolutely nasty that their most recent post(s) have been about peddling their paid DLC that they have since delayed twice now. As a consumer I feel cheated and disgusted by whoever is responsible for that. At least those behind Victoria III saw it through to actually fix their game before charging for DLCs... EDIT: Also, let's not forget the waterfront/beach DLC they tried to release and got flamed for and made it part of the base game. AND the Southwest Region Pack, where there are several missing assets which causes fun issues like floating signs and fences which STILL has not been fixed. >.>

The game crashes all the time and doesn't load old saves. It's fun, but it's unplayable.

After finishing up a few other games, I just recently relauched this after a year. I have tried across several days to really sink in, only to feel very disappointed. First off, to the developer that changed the settings in the most recent update to not automatically save, I hope you stub your toe everyday until this is fixed. The game is crashes all the time. It seems to be an issue with the latest update and I hope it gets fixed however, I'm not wasting anymore time on this game until this is fixed. The number of times that I have reached a milestone to have the game crash and have to try again is making me doubt my very existence. The amount of building I need to support a population of 50,000 seems excessive. The city I live in is 10x the size but with way fewer high rise apartment buildings. I think this is miss calculated. I also don't agree with how far you have to get into the game before you can create a risen highway. By the time I unlock this I have to basically demolish my town and start all over. The incoming traffic also gets backed up for miles even though I only have a population of 20,000 seems off. I can't create any train tracks on inclines (seems like it should automatically add risers to accomplish this and then base the cost of the track off of the risers needed to build.). I tried to use the tool to adjust the slops and it seems to not work at all now. I know that this game came out without the polishing work, but it seems like the company is more focused on producing poor DLCs then fixing the many issues.

There is no purpose to playing this game other than aesthetics. If you want to build a nice good-looking city buy the game. Other than that, the game is still broken and still has to go through many changes. Traffic is broken, homelessness is broken, all the parks must have people living in them for some reason, soccer fields have tents on them and are not used by NPC's. NPC routing is broken. Not sure why would anyone play the game other than building a good looking city that is barel functional. FIX YOUR GAME THAT YOU ARE SELLING FOR $70 CAD. its so frustrating to see the potential to what this game could have been vs what it really is right now. Every couple of months there is a new update that literally breaks my city, and not to mention that this is not yet ready for consoles. Amazing work Colossal Order. Get your ** together guys common

-Lack of content -No asset editor -No simulation performance -Poor communication And an 18 month delay for dlc?

I'm used to game studios being run incompetently, but CO seems to be on an entirely different level. What have they actually released in the 19 months since launch, other than the CCPs and asset packs that were made by people outside of CO? Not much. All of the big ticket items that they were meant to work on themselves have been delayed with little to no information. The game even lacks basic animations. Then, there is the icing on the cake. They promise (and sell) the Bridges and Ports DLC for Q2 2024. They then delay it to Q4 2024. Then Q2 2025. And now Q4 2025. There is no excuse for such poor post-launch support, not even having a small team. Plenty of indie developers with <10 employees push out higher quality content with more regularity. They are very quickly losing the little community support they have left, so either they need to monumentally step up or hand out refunds, instead of stringing people along. The reputational damage was not worth the quick buck.

Every time I try to play the game it is a half hour of fighting with it just to get it to load. Lags to do anything. Crash happy. Mods or no mods. Loads up on the wrong monitor. Every time I try to play the game I have to go into IT mode to figure out how to massage it into working and this is just to get to the main menu. Running: AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT on a AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor with 64 GB RAM and installed on a 2TB M.2 SSD. All drivers up to date. This game is just garbage compared to the first one.

Came back to play the game after a 6 month break and I cannot even start a game!!! The mod download/update takes forever now (and I mean HOURS) and it is absolute unacceptable from a game that has been released for one and half year already.

For a long time i had faith in this game, that it'd improve and reach the quality and quantity of content as CS1, and have a lively modding community due to the new features added. However, as it has been over a year since release i have only seen the game be carried by the devs having the modding community do heavy lifting by adding Region packs, this would be an excellent thing had it not been the lack of anything worthwhile coming from the developers alongside said region packs. To quote the developers latest news "Since the release of the Detailers patch, we’ve spent the last five months working hard on the Bridges & Ports DLC, and towards our upcoming expected release. After reviewing the content ourselves and sharing it with our early access group, we’ve received consistent feedback: the bridges are super exciting, and the port works well, but there are aspects of the expansion that are not as polished as they could be. That left us with a difficult choice: delay the release once again to add more depth, or release it as-is, knowing players may feel it falls short. We believe the current content is enjoyable, but we’re not blind to what’s missing, and to bring it to the level you deserve, we need more time." As far as i can tell, the developers have been pushing out lackluster content full of nothing but "New" (reskins basically) buildings rather than any game changing features or QOL content CS1 has had. I expected more considering this was to be a major shift the in city building genre. Instead we still have the same buggy mess that has low performance with not as much but still plentiful crashes. Rarely do i ever give up hope on a games ability to improve, this one has broken me. Do not purchase this product, all you are buying is the developers time to delay further reskins to existing content just for them to funnel said money into what i presume is other projects as they have clearly given up on this project.

Every single major patch can break the game. Even after reinstalling the game and loading into with mods disabled, the game doesn't boot up properly or just crashes.

The latest quays and piers "patch" made my game unplayable. It only displays a blurry render of the ocean and the sky. This was one time too many. It seems every time there is an update it glitches out another part of the game. I can't recommend it until colossal order polishes it more. Also the bus lanes are useless since the game doesn't let you ban cars from them.

This should really be a mixed review, but for the general person I wouldn't recommend this game. There's lots of great stuff over cities 1, more buildings, better roadbuilding, a bigger map. BUT, I feel like I speak for a lot of people when I say the single most wanted feature was a game that doesn't lag. And its just worse than cities 1. Also, why does my seemingly megacity only have 300K population? It's just another KSP2 it seems, hopefully in a few years this will become the city builder game it was meant to be but for now the jank factor is just too great. Bottom line is definitely get it if you're a massive simcity fan and love detailing. Otherwise, wait for a sale at best. And why the move from the steam workshop, it's been ages and the paradox mods feature is just straight up worse. It's just a straight step in the wrong direction especially for a game so reliant on mods

Since the game wont open, I can truly say 1 star is a perfect rating. It gets stuck on a sky screen and does not proceed to the main menu. Numerous critical errors that won't go away even after reloading the game. Wouldn't encourage others to buy this game. Updated review. The game says I played 631 hours since my review. Impossible since I wrote the review less than 48 hrs ago. I followed the "Our tips to fix" and still cannot open the game. I hear music but no menu or main screen...just a black screen instead of the water and sky issue mentioned in the original review. Not getting my monies worth if I can not play it.

Latest update has, once again, broken the game! CO & Paradox are really having a laugh; it's been more than a year and a half since release and the game still has issues of constant crashing and poor optimisation, settings are never saved, broken game mechanics with missing statistics, still poor traffic AI (like, awful) - now issues with launching, again. CS2 has its moments, but overall a complete headache, and for £42 they really need to do better...

This is a complicated review for me to write as a prolific city builder player since I could use a computer. The PROS of CS2: - The roadbuilding and other infrastructure tools are top-notch and easily the best in any city builder. Certain mods make it even better, like lane direction tool. - The mod library is growing weekly and it is making the experience better. - If you have a half-way decent PC, this game is technically better than CS1. Graphics, sounds, simulation, etc... and you can grow larger cities per amount of PC horsepower used... CS1 came out in the quad-core CPU era, and this game is in the 6 - 8 core mainstream PC era and if you have those resources, this game will use all of it. - The simulation is more in-depth than CS1, but it is half-baked because Colossal/Paradox needed more development time for this game. There are a lot of nuanced characteristics which dictate how citizens own houses in the game, for example, but Colossal/Paradox are always tweaking those variables in each patch because of how unprepared it was. The CONS of CS2: - This game needed easily another year of development time. Like I mentioned, the simulation has more variables to it, but they weren't properly implemented. Each patch tweaks these variables to make the game better, but the devs are kinda playing a game of whack-a-mole because each change they make has cascading effects. - If you have a low-end PC, don't bother running the game. Like I stated in the PROS section, if your PC has some oomph behind it, you can and will be able to build BIG. If you're on a PC from the CS1 era - quad core, GTX 1060, 16GB RAM era, this game will run like poop. The game picks up very well when you give it a Ryzen 2000+ 8-core CPU (or Intel 9700k 8-core CPU), 32GB RAM and an RTX 3060/6700 XT or better GPU. I run this game on a Ryzen 6900HS/RTX 3070 Ti/32GB RAM laptop and it's pretty good. - The specialized industries are half-baked at the moment. They were a DLC in CS1. They come with the base game here. The devs needed more time to flesh this aspect of the game out properly. - Most of the statistics the game shows you are nebulous and inconsistent. This is because of all the tweaks they make in each patch, and what the devs decide to present to you. You can't really trust them and instead should use common sense and classic querying/watching/observing to get an idea for how your city is flowing. If you go based on what the game's stats tell you, you'll run out of money pretty quick. TL;DR: Technically better than CS1. Needed another year of development time to actually be better than CS1. I recommend and don't recommend it at the same time.

Honestly? What a let down. 600 hours in, update the game, break it, I cant play it no matter how hard I try troubleshoot. Congrats on a legitimately terrible game

Devs dont even know how to release new content. New update broke the game completely. Stay away from this trash company.

Been playing for a while and noticed that the stability of game needs improvement. I have a pretty decent PC that can run games like this, so obviously it's the developers that are at fault.... fix your game Colossal Order.

I absolutely love this game. It's beautiful and brilliant. But as others have said, its not finished. There are too many issues to consider it finished. My favorite part about these games is managing traffic with a rising population and the traffic system is completely broken. The road system itself (building, maintenance, decor, etc) is phenomenal and scores above CS1. But what's the point if the traffic AI has no idea how to drive? CS1 had similar (albeit less serious) issues with traffic, but you could manage it through lane change rules at every road segment. CS2 can't even do that as far as I know. I've waited 20 months for the devs to fix the traffic before giving this game a positive review. But here we are. Traffic is still broken. I can't recommend this game until the traffic works. Stop working on DLC PLEASE until the base game is performing how it should. Once the traffic is fixed I will recommend this game despite all of the other issues, because it really is that good.

Absolute joke of a game, don't bother giving it any time, you just lose it all because the game crashes half the time you try to save it and save recoveries don't work. Not to mention it runs like shit with big cities even on high end computers.

Do no buy and support this. How can this game still be in this state after more than a year is beyond me. No communication from the devs. No assist manager and still reliant on mods for basic functionality (Traffic Manager, Move it, Zoneing Manager.) This should be labelled early access. The fact that they are working on a DLC when the game is still in this state is a slap in the face.

I've waited and waited and waited for the game to come around and it just hasn't. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments of all time. Game still runs mediocre and all of the workshop stuff with the original is hardly there since it is in the client. Just sad and I've finally given up. Colossal Order completely dropped the ball.

I have nearly 1500 hours under my belt on C:S 1 - and I can't say that this game really matches its energy. It's not BAD necessarily, but it's significantly less stable, and the mod community has been much slower on the uptake. The game looks nice, but not so much nicer that I could advise playing it over C:S 1. I had high hopes for this game but it definitely fails to live up to the original, which more and more is starting to seem like lightning in a bottle.

I am so freaking beyond done being frustrated with this game. CANT EVEN LOAD GAME VANILLA AFTER PATCH! I HATE THIS! I reinstalled, turned off every mod, turned off modding, uninstalled the mods, reinstalled the damned game, and HERE WE ARE! It loads me in the game engine directly and lets me float around above the water, can't even get to the main menu I didn't even want your broken update. I was playing one moment, and it CRASHED, and the you FORCED ME TO UPDATE, and NOW IT DOESNT WORK YET AGAIN, AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN LET ME CHOOSE IT HATE THIS !!!! I HATE IT!!! Just let me play it ike I was! without DESTROYING MY EXPERIENCE YET AGAIN!!!!!!! I HATE THE WAY YOU DEVELOP!!!! I HATE IT!

Worst game ever and best game ever. When u can start it without any errors, and u actually start playing after 3 hours off fixing issue in ur notepad in their game files, that they create with their "new" patch, ridicules i know. ITS THE BEST GAME EVER. DONT BUY IT, PLEASE!

This game is truly the peak-est City Builder Game. The Region pack was so truly a great addition and the fact that you can download mods from the game it self is a game changer. I highly recommend this game for any city builder enthusiasts.

I wouldn't speak badly about the game. But i can't recommend it in its current state. I've given it time, nearly a year to come get the updates it needed but its missing things that made the CS1 so much fun. I can't get past that all the residential buildings look identical, that the buildings no longer upgrade themselves, Yes its pretty but your city just feels stagnate. In CS1 it felt like it was aging as the city grew. Now you build a neighborhood and the buildings always look the same and never change. You never want to visit the same parts of town again. Idk guess its just the high expectation of CS1. Then to see their already trying to sell DLC for a game that's i wouldn't even consider finished is very sad.

Pains me to say this. But the game is clunky and its still very much in Beta. Missing the tremendous amounts of ugc that made skylines I the true sandbox it was. They just released a patch which has broken the game, and they want me to load it up in dev mode to fix it. Like... seriously? You want me to dev mode and fix this.... if its so easy, patch it for everyone! There's loads of great features and the graphics update on the first game is massive. I desperately want this game to succeed. But its not there yet. maybe wait another year.

The game is still super buggy after being out for a year. I have had several issues, especially after a patch or update. CO really should do better

there are lots of bug... also the game suddenly closes in the middle

not a bad game overall, but if you want to make a realistic city, cs1 is much better, especially with the workshop

Every update makes it even worse. 1,5 years of development and still broken with no chance that they will ever fix it. - an absolute joke - Safe your money and don't buy it not even on sale

Two years after release, the game is still in a sorry state. A real disgrace on PDX and CO. While the game is still as bugged as a KGB office, they have the audacity to release paid content. The cherry on top was a breach in security in the Mod Management system not so long ago. That did it for me. I am trowing the towel on the game and on CO. I canot reccomend you enough NOT TO buy this game, no matter the price you find it.

Pardon for the bad English but here's my honest review with my 11 hours playtime For starters i bought this game and excpecting it to be laggy and turns out it's not that bad, I get around 50 FPS when i with 2k population. The game in general feels a bit harder than the first one. The game also lacks of modification compared to the first one and game sometimes crash because of the mods. My laptop specs are: i7 12700H RTX 3050 4Gb 16 x 2 32Gb 3200MHZ External monitor 1080p Low/Medium settings Pros: - Good graphics - Fun sequel - Better road tools - Decent free contents Cons: - Still bad in optimizations - Lack of mods Conclusion: If you want to play a city simulator that can be changed in more ways just get the first one its cheaper, lighter, and have lots of mods. And if you're looking for a better graphics game and a sequel to the first game, this game is worth it and still be a fun game to play. The current state of the game can be better and so i hope for the best in the near future.

Devs break the game whenever they release an update and then expect us to just bug fix on our own. The game is fun when it doesn't crash and when I can load it

1. performance is still shit 2. tons of errors and crashes 3. u are not allowed to play on older versions of the game, even if they work better for u 4. developers basically ask the community to do their own work that they get paid for (fixing issues for example) game can be fun but only if u are lucky and the game runs for u without crashing or having hickups after every minor update. we can only safe the gaming industry if we stop paying money for shit!

controls suck, overall gameplay sucks, graphics suck, and the game is horribly preformance and storage optimized.

Why patch or update the game just for it to not even load? Stuck on the main screen view without any options to click anything. I have 0 mods; play vanilla with 2 saved games. I shouldn't have to uninstall and reinstall again after every update ESPECIALLY when it updated itself automatically. I didn't even choose for it to update. Save your money, play the first, and mod it through Steam (which this one isn't even available through Steam Workshop).