Cities: Skylines II

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. UPDATE: Game works with no mods, which is absolutely dogshit considering the base game lacks a ton of mechanics. Though it is still playable, I am just being picky. Furthermore, garbage is not being produced in my city by any of the residents, which sounds like a good problem to have, except that my Garbage Trucks decide not leave the depo and instead deploy 0/30 of my trucks, leaving my power plants uncollected - which is reducing my power production efficiency 50% - bankrupting my city by importing power at an exorbant rate. Fuck PARADOX!

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.

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.

It's not ready. Maybe in a few years it'll live up to its predecessor, but today is not that day. There are some tools that are amazing and have much more flexibility than CS, but it comes at the cost of infuriating "features". One of the biggest issues that prevent you from building huge cities is the nightmarish traffic AI. Vehicles will randomly pull illegal turns without any clear rhyme or reason. You *must* build separated highways, because the 4 lane will result in traffic jams as civs will pull a U-turn in the middle of the road. Civs will also do left-hand turns from the right lane, cutting off traffic and causing traffic lights to switch. Also, there are no bikes. So if you want to foster a walkable city, good luck because most civs will still drive. I challenged a friend to a build competition and after 10 hours, I am spending all of my time just trying to get civs to drive like actual humans and follow the rules of the road. Double yellow lines mean nothing in this game. Based on the current state of the game, it is not worth the price.

7/10. This is a very cautious recommend- if you really enjoyed the first one and it's on sale I'd say it's worth picking up. Several caveats, however: - "Normal" difficulty balance is all out of whack, primarily because of the speed of the game. It's unbelievably slow - I don't need to be building New York in 20 minutes but in other citybuilders there's a ramp-up in growth that is missing here. Developing your city is extremely tedious and you get the sense that you're being punished for expanding. Easy is a little too easy but overall far more entertaining. - The lack of custom assets is starting to really show. The existing asset packs are nice, but your cities began looking like clones of each other quickly. The 'row house' zoning option nicely hides this lack of assets because row house neighborhoods in many cities (DC, Brooklyn, Philly) are all very similar looking IRL, so that's a nice bit of accidental realism, I suppose. - The cities feel lifeless and dull. Zooming in on parks nobody is doing anything other than walking around. I miss the little sprites of kids running and playing in parks, people chatting outside of restaurants, etc., from SimCity 4. All of this said, I went back to CS1 and found it really showing its age. The road design tools are great and the scale of the cities feels far better than CS1. Still not quite as good as the classics, but until we get a remaster of those I think this is the best option for a citybuilder out there.

This is a buggy disappointing mess. It runs worse than the first game, and despite having better vanilla road tools, it has a fraction of the simulation as the original.

Cities 2 is getting better but is still not good enough, BUT it's still the best city building game without any gimmicks and it's still fun. If you don't like trouble shooting don't buy this game beceause it sometimes just randomly crashes.

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.

I would always play Cities Skylines I and pray that they make a second game just as good as the first. Well they definitely made a second game but a do have to say it is not all that. WHEN THE GAME IS PLAYABLE it is actually a pretty fun and flawless game, on my PC this game runs very smoothly up until I have a population of around 600,00 Citizens. But most of the time THE GAME DOESN'T EVEN LOAD INTO THE MAIN SCREEN. This is especially saddening for me because i had been mourning for this game to release and this is probably the main reason i got a high power PC and PAID $90 FOR IT. THIS GAME IS NOT ALL THE HYPE DO NOT BUY. IS A WASTE OF MONEY AND TIME IF YOU ARE TRYING TO GET THE GAME TO WORK. Overall 3/10. !!!!!!!!DO NOT BUY!!!!!!!

With Cities Skyline I as reference and all mods that have been created over the years to improve quality of life you would expect that Cities Skyline II would be a winner as of day one. The opposite is true, game was released broken and a almost all the things they could have learned and adapted from the mod community were ignored. Game simulation is still broken, detailed city and economy management is missing and for quality of life still heavily leaning on third party mods. Latest update broke my game, even reinstalling didn't solve. In this state not woth your money

Despite all the hate I actually liked this game, key word is "liked" the latest update completely broke the game and even following the fix guide doesn't work. It has even been a month and they haven't done anything about it. Just to think the mods were just starting to get somewhere too like road builder which that mod should've been built into the game from the beginning. Honestly reinstalling city skylines and going back. RIP the custom maps I was making, and my larger cities. ps any devs out there please allow update selection like HOI4.

Paradox should be ashamed of themselves. The game is a shadow of the original title.

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.

Somehow after two years of development with its previous game as a blueprint this game still lacks pretty much most features from skylines 1

Loved playing it even with it's heavily bugged launch. Sadly I can no longer launch the game or access my content after the last major update (Quays & Piers). Uninstalled Current game time: ~52 Hours of game time ~8 Hours of loading screens

Amazing game... but it is terrible at the moment. Mind you this game eats up A LOT of time and yet I have had to uninstall and completely erase my save files twice in order to fix. Come back in a YEAR if you want to buy it.

Holy moly batman. This game is super poorly optimized. I have a well ventilated system, with good fan curves for ultra settings in basically all games with my 3080 and I have never seen it get hotter than 76 C. Enter CS2. First boot up it hit 98 C. Set everything to low and still about 86-89 C. This is ridiculous. The game has been out for two years? How is it this bad still?

Currently, I absolutely WILL NOT recommend this game to anyone! With the last upgrade the game will not launch, and cannot be played. All it does is give a blurry splash screen with no UI. Despite a lot of complaints from other players concerning the last upgrade, and the game being un-playable, so far Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive have not address the problem. The solution(s) they suggested does not correct the problem, and I have since removed it from my computer. No sense taking up storage space with a game that does not work.

Sigh, i wanted to like this game. I really did after being such a big fan of cities 1... But I just cant. with how long the game has been out and how bad the game performs is unacceptable. I've waited until now to leave a review because of their recent updates. "free patch" "Our tips to fix" are you joking? after releasing paid content on a broken game that doesn't nearly live up to the standard as advertised, how dare you release a "free patch"... it had better be fuckin free. The entire game should be free when you have to release a how to fix OUR game update... What an absolute scam and joke of a company. Hope to god we can all get in on a lawsuit and get some of our money back.

I love this game but its completely unplayable unless your basically a software engineer and can fix the game for paradox who has apparently completely given up on usability

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

I’ve waited and waited. Im tired of the people constantly defending you, what improvements have actually happened all of the content we have got has been made by content creators and modders not devs. I think the problem, is laziness I honestly find it really unlikely this is being worked in by a team for 40hrs a week. If that’s the case how have we still not got a game that will even play. This sucks! It’s my favorite game. Obviously im pissed. I just don’t see how you can take everyone’s money and then for one, not even give us what we paid for. Maybe im wrong but over a year and the game won’t even play now, especially on GeForce now , a place where we had hope of getting mods like every other game on GeForce, but no not cities. I hope someone that has passion for this kind of game can make something we can play. Or at least not keep giving us a run around because no work is being done or at least anything noticeable especially when it won’t even play

The game itself is fine but from what I've heard or seen, CS1 is way better than the sequel. If you have an older PC don't even consider buying this game if you don't want to play in 14 fps. Every single update ruins your whole save, forcing you to start a new city every time. The biggest problem is the performance of the game. It's been out for almost 2 years yet I see close to no difference in the gameplay experience. At this point I can't even play the game because my PC doesn't allow it and even the menus are impossible to go through. My inputs register after 10 seconds or so (bcz of the lag) and it takes over 40 minutes to just update the mods. I don't want to spend over 800$ to buy a new pc just to play this. My 1050TI is catching fire whenever i open this game and oftenly crashes after 30 min of gameplay. Absolutely horrible. Just buy CS1🥀🥀🙏

Its amazing. The amount of new features makes the game so much more fun. It looks and feels better than Cities Skylines one. I have over 2k+ hours on CS1 and this is so much better. It does take up a bit of space but its worth the $50ish it costs to buy it. I personally say "This is the best game I have ever played" and I mean it. It is the BEST GAME EVER!!! I LOVE IT!!!

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.

I got this game on launch and played a bit of it after loving the first one but could tell it was severely lacking. almost 2 years later i still don't see any real reason to return.

Love the game but it almost never works. Everytime I feel the desire to play, I almost always spend an hour trying to problem solve an issue to get the game to work and give up on playing it.

Genuinely insane they released a game in this state, i mean with the insane ghosting artifacts and how little work was put into the disasters this game should not even be close to how much it costs. Great job.

The game on itself is okay, however "okay" should be understood in broader context: - Game promised realism like never before. We got junk on launch, that was then promised to be fixed later on the way. - Released DLC are prime example of money extraction tactics. Beach properties without actual beach, This is prime example of treating your customer as a bag with money and nothing else. - We've got patches and I can write how development team is doing their best, but after such a long time there're still a lot of broken mods, bugs in vanilla game and simulation is a joke. I've spent half of my life in software development, spent few years doing startups with +10M valuations and this is not something I would ever sign off. 1. Terrible launch of something I would call a beta version 2. Rushed DLCs to just have a legal covered i.e "Hey we delivered something at least, yeah?" 3. After such a long time the base game lacks good content and is filled with bugs, modding is very broken. This is okay game by itself, but with this history and steep pricing, "okay" becomes "terrible in general". Buy this game only if you have too much money or don't care about value of the product that much (and you didn't play Skylines I, because in comparison this game is just a joke). If you meet those criteria, you might have at least some fun, I guess.

Buggy game. 2 years later, it's disgustingly buggy. I started up my game for the first time only to get bombarded by "Critical Error" for not being able to initialize batches for sign posts or whatever. When in game, the graphics keep glitching out, with constant artifacting on screen. Running on a 5900x and 7900xtx, so it's not a potato PC issue. It's a game issue. Paradox has done it again.

DO NOT BUY<<<< DO NOT BUY<<<< I had this game on my wish list for a long time. I love this type of game. Decided to buy it. Despite the bad reviews because some people had said the game was much better now that 2 years had passed. I am here to tell you. DO NOT buy. The game it's self "May be" okay, If it worked. Constant crashing, conpoents of the building tools are clearly not completed, glitches all over the place. Honestly you will need to install a bunch of mods to finish out the game to a more playable level. This is a beta level game. Takes more computer to run than it should and all. Worst part is you will likely not see how incomplete the game is till it is way past getting a refund for. Games like these take some time to learn and even get to a place you need to use many of the components. When that time comes you will see they stopped making the game, and you will be out your money. They are just straight up scamming people. Steam really should delist this game. With all that said. Can you have fun with the game? Sure you can. You just have to be willing to constantly tinker deep inside the game files to keep it working, not every time you want to play will it load with out spending time figuring out how to fix an issue caused from the last patch, read guides on how to fix issues, load and keep mods up to date, know the game will crash likely every time you play it. Maybe loosing progress. And be willing to pay money for all of that. After the last "patch" of fixes. I havent been able to figure out how to get the game working for 2 weeks not. Hours spent not playing. Just reading about things to try in order to "fix" the issue caused by the patch!!!!

The game doesn't launch two years after its release. One of the greatest failures in gaming history.

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

A little under two years after release and this game is still not ready for anyone who doesn't have a top-of-the-line computer or a lot of patience.

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

Having a great time until the game crashed and I lost everything :/ Really wanted to believe it could work but trust the overwhelming majority of review...

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.

The game itself is great, the simulatuion and city building aspects are fantastic and an awesome step-up from the previous city builders ive played in the past, however ive experianced some serious issues that just prevent me from playing the game at all. The issue is not fixed, but support is pretty good ig

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.

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!

I would recommend this game only to people who liked the first game. This sequel game still has fewer features than the game it follows. It is poorly optimized, laggy often, and there have been multiple occasions where I have had to troubleshoot serious issues to even open the game due to developer updates that entirely brick games with modded data. (this game is so underdeveloped that it highly neccesitates mods and yet they cannot be used often for fear of completely bricking the game) Paradox games should be ashamed of how poor a job they've done with this game. I love this series and will continue to play CS2 as it updates but it is such a trainwreck that I cannot in good concious recommend it to anyone unless they are getting a discount or it is free. Developers have given up on interfacing with the community because they can't take the heat over how they've done the bare minimum at every turn. I still have faith that they may fix many of its issues because the previous title got updates for more than half a decade after its release, but its been nearly 2 years since release and I don't think its even neccesarily good enough that it would deserve to be released...at all.

As a gamer and customer i'm truly dissatisfied by the way colossal order treated me. After playing and often revisiting and even buying several DLC packs fot cities skylines 1, almost 2 years ago, I was really happy to hear that cities skylines was getting a successor and even better, the release was really close. Because I was so happy with the first game, I bought the second one a week before release. I was so happy about it, I even bought the ultimate edition, costing me 90 euro, but hey, what could go wrong? It's the same people that made skylines 1. I really did not have a habbit of buying games pre release, I really made an exception for this one, but boy, how did that turn out ... We're closing in on 2 years after release date and I still haven't gotten all the items I paid for. Every time I try the game, it just doesn't feel finished and instead of revisiting the game itself, I mostly revisit the steam store page for skylines 2, to see what updates were released and if the game is getting where it should have been. Every visit to this page ends in dissapointment from my end. How is it even possible that this game's in the state that it is, with gamebreaking patches, missing content, ...? Colossal order promissed so much, even a week before release, and only started comunicating about the promisses maybe not being fully met at release, about 2 days prior to release. Still, it would be their priority number one, and they would fix everything as fast a possible. Almost 2 years later, after giving them the benefit of the doubt, I can only say I'm dissapointed and feel like Colossal Order simply lied to me. I would have never bothered buying the game if I had any idea of the state it was in and the state it would be in, more than a year and a halve down the line. I would not have bought an ultimate edition for 90 euros, knowing that after a year and a half, I wouldn't have received the dlc's I was promissed. Honestly, I feel like the people at Colossal Order and Paradox should be ashamed by how they released this game and how they treated customers who bought the ultimate edition. You shouldn't have made promisses you knew you couldn't keep, you should have not allowed for pre orders and you should have postponed release. You could have anounced cities skylines 2, with a release date much later in the future of not even announced it at all, two years ago. To be honost, I wish I just kept my 90 euros and hadn't had to deal with the dissapointment that this whole experience has become.

It's pretty fun. Definitely buggy and unpolished but it has gotten a lot better with time. Some features are top-notch (pathway editing in particular) and the game is (now) in a state where it's considerably more difficult than CS1 (on normal mode) and has a more sophisticated feeling simulation (e.g., you can feel out cause and effect while playing, things don't break or otherwise work in unpredictable ways, patterns usually mean something), although a lot of the statistics tools need work/are less useful than before (bring back CS1 route mode, please!) A lot of things remain pretty unpolished (why is it so hard to see anything at night when that's 50% of ingame time, what is up with the huge buildings, why isn't there a dedicated terrain infoview) and a bit jank (specialised industries????, zone grids, etc) but despite that it's good fun. It looks better and plays better than the original, and with mod support I personally enjoy it more than that game. Might be a wise spending decision to hold off for a few more patch updates, but the core game is a pretty good time now.

Unlike a lot of people, I think this is a good game. My computer is fortunately powerful enough to run it just fine, and the base game integrates a lot of features that I needed mods for in CS1. It's the same gameplay experience, just with an updated game engine and more integrated features. I do play it regularly and will continue to play it. However, I can't honestly recommend it while they still require you to use their proprietary mod platform. Steam workshop is inherently better, because it's built into the platform I'm already using. Paradox, Implement support for it, like you should have before the game launched.

**Update 7/18/25 - I finally got it to work, if anyone wants to know. I loaded into the game with core mods disabled. Went into the manager and uninstalled everything that was made incompatible at last update. Closed the game. Verified Integrity of files and launched it as normal. Works. However, i've read that some cant even make it to the Title Screen to even do that. In that case, and this is just me speculating, find wherever your mods are installed and delete all of them just to be safe, and see if that helps. I love Cities, which is why i find myself right back here even when i say i wont. I just want it to work like it should. Its a shame we have devolved to a situation where the PLAYERS have to become debuggers just to play the game we already paid for. I'm pretty technically sound and even I find it extremely tedious and confusing at times when trying to get things like this to work, so i cant imagine how a casual, normal person would feel. I have a friend who i'm trying to turn from the console side to PC who sees me constantly having to fix games i buy just to play them and it keeps him firmly seated in console land because of it. (Yes, Sad. Moving on.) Anyways, end of "Gaming Companies Suck Now" rant. They do, but this review wont change that lol Back to Cities: Newbies should still be aware this is something we have to deal with, so if you wanna buy it, just be prepared for when that inevitable day comes that you load in and it crashes! Super fun and relaxing when it works. It is my decompressor which is why i've been hell bent on fixing it lol ORIGINAL REVIEW: Quays Update Issues Latest update causes instant crash even after following their advice to fix. The game was finally good and in one fell swoop, they killed it. If anyone knows a way to revert to the previous update, let me know! Aside from that, newcomers beware!

It's so nice to see that every single time I launch the game I am greeted with a blue error screen telling me that the game can't launch. How nice! 2/10 cash grab P.S. - I have tried to make the game work for hours, yet no avail. I genuenly don't understand why it's so hard delivering a product that actually works. R.I.P. the gaming industry I guess :(

Game was really disappointing and should be considered early access. Has less content than cities skylines 1 and game clearly wasn't ready for release. almost 2 years later nothing has been updated or changed with almost 0 new content. Very sad! I will change my review if this changes but at this point, I doubt it will

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