Cities Skylines 2 Review - Utopia Or Dystopia?

The original Cities Skylines was arguably the gold standard for city-builder games. It rushed in to fill the niche left by the fall of SimCity and has ruled the roost ever since. It's been released for pretty much every console going, and I think it's the best the genre currently has to offer. The sequel, Cities Skylines 2, has big shoes to fill. How do you improve on the original, especially after years of mods, updates, and DLC? Evolution over revolution seems to have been Paradox's approach, and I think it pays off. There are no grand sweeping changes, but that's not a bad thing. This is very much a refinement of the first game that comes closer than ever to city-building perfection.

I say city builder, but the Skylines series is somewhere between that and a god game. You are totally omnipotent when it comes to placing buildings, designing your city's infrastructure, and even altering the landscape, but you are still responsible for the well-being of your citizens and have lots of other duties more befitting of a mayor or governor of some kind. You can set the tax rate, make decisions on public policy, and so on. This was one of the first things that drew me into the first game—the way the macro and the micro blend together seamlessly. I can't really explain why, but there's something about first building a new park district and then having to design an optimal bus route so that your citizens in the low-income housing on the other side of town can actually access it that adds a special something to the whole process.

You start out with nothing but a plot of land near a major highway. From there, it's up to you to build roads and a sewage system and make sure whatever you build has access to clean water and electricity. That might sound like a lot to take in, but the onboarding process (which is always hugely important for games of this complexity) is excellent. There's a whole suite of tutorials that explain very clearly how to lay the groundwork for your future metropolis, and as long as you pay attention, you won't be overwhelmed. Paradox made a smart decision to gate the more complex tools and systems behind various milestones so that new players don't have to worry about absolutely everything right from the off. There's also a new XP system that lets you use points to unlock new buildings and facilities in any order you choose. It lets you move at your own pace, which I like a lot.

It's perfectly alright to take your time, watch your city grow, and tackle the more complex stuff like new sources of energy and various kinds of industry later on, not to mention having to manage traffic flow and the postal system. In the beginning, everything is fairly straightforward, but there are still lots of interesting decisions to make. Where exactly do you want to start building? Near the trees? Forest fires are a real risk. Near the water so you can build a lovely seafront shopping district? Have you made sure that the industrial sector is downwind of people's homes? This is just the beginning. You'll also have to make sure that your sewage system isn't contaminating your drinking water and that your city has the appropriate healthcare and rescue services. It sounds like a lot, but trust me when I say the game handles it all beautifully. I never felt as though my city were spiraling out of control or that I had condemned the populace to certain doom because of some innocuous decision I'd made early on.

More importantly, those interesting decisions and dilemmas never stop coming. Skylines 2 is so much more than just a creativity toy. The way you expand, how you set budgets for the various city services, and how you respond to the demands of your citizens all feed back into each other beautifully so that there is always a problem that needs solving and a solution to it. Do you risk relying on renewable energy to protect your people from harmful pollution, also inviting in the possibility of being overwhelmed when your wind turbines can't meet the demand for power? Perhaps you need to divert funds from the police force so you can afford to buy a nearby section of coastline where the winds are more reliably fierce.

So far though, I could be describing the first game, and honestly, I wouldn't blame someone who had just booted up Skylines 2 for the first time for not realising they weren't playing the first game. There are some important differences, however. First and most obviously, there's the amount of land you are given to play with. The first game gave you nine tiles to build on, which was more than enough for most people. The sequel, on the other hand, lets you use up to 150 tiles at once. You have to purchase new tiles as your city grows, but still, that is a lot of space to work with. There is now potential to build something truly spectacular: a vast, sprawling urban jungle that would shame even modern-day supercities like Tokyo and Shanghai.

It might seem a little crass or obvious, but honestly, I think supersizing the game was a good decision. When you're working off such a solid foundation, why not take things to the logical extreme? You're never forced to use the entire space if you don't want to, but series veterans will appreciate the extra room to build and the challenge it offers.

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Before getting into the other changes, I want to quickly mention how the first game's excellent UI design returns for the sequel. It's refreshing to see a game go out of its way to display what is a huge amount of information with such clarity. So many modern games treat the UI as an afterthought, but that is far from the case here. Every mechanic from electricity to noise pollution has its own bespoke overlay, each of which is only ever a click or two away. All the information displayed is easy to understand and looks great too. Sure, this is pretty boring stuff to talk about, but it's clear that a lot of work went into it, and you'd miss it if it weren't up to standard.

The other changes are more subtle but actually end up having a far-greater impact. I love how most buildings are upgradeable now. In the first game, all you could really do to improve various services like the fire department and the police force was to keep building more fire or police stations, respectively. Now you can upgrade these buildings and increase their effectiveness. You no longer have to stamp out five new hospitals every time you build a new district. It did feel a bit silly having to build the same stuff over and over again in the first game, so it's nice to see this addressed.

By far the most important change is what Paradox has done to the traffic AI. If you played the first game, you will know all too well the misery of watching your city fall into ruin as your garbage trucks and fire engines sit stuck in traffic for days, if not months at a time. My colleague Yousef A. Zain has written more extensively on the subject, but here's the long and short of it. Where in the first game drivers would only consider distance when planning their route, they are now responsive to a variety of factors, including time, comfort, money, and how busy the roads are. These can even vary in their importance depending on whether the driver is a teen, an adult, or a senior. As far as I can tell, this new system works great. I never ran into the nightmare gridlocks of the first game, and even my primitive road systems just about coped with heavy traffic.

It might not sound like a big change, but by tweaking this feature, Paradox has made the game a lot less frustrating to play. You still have to plan your highways properly, but one poorly judged intersection will no longer send your city into a death spiral from which it may never recover. The removal of that particular sword of Damocles makes the whole game a lot more fun to play. Without having to constantly worry about where the next traffic jam was going to happen, I was free to sit back and appreciate my beautiful new city.

Just like in the first game, the level of detail is truly stunning. There is incredible variety to the buildings, and every single citizen is modeled and has a life of their own—a life that you can meaningfully impact. You can watch a poor family struggle for generations until some benevolent overseer (that's me if you're wondering) builds a new college just down the road. For the first time, the children are given a proper education and are able to go out into the world and put it to use. You can see this happen in real-time. Every citizen has an education level, wealth, employment, and family. Even household pets are tracked and rendered in real-time. I could spend hours surveying the streets, watching my citizens go about their days. It reminds me of when I used to have sea monkeys.

Unfortunately, there are some serious performance issues that make doing this a lot harder than it needs to be. Loading times are long, the framerate is hugely inconsistent, and there are a lot of freezes and hang-ups. This is all with the settings dialed down significantly, and I have a machine more than powerful enough to run this game in a decent state. For a game this beautiful, it's a real shame that soaking in the sights isn't quite as satisfying as it should be. These issues don't totally ruin the experience, but they need to be at the top of Paradox's list for fixes post-release. Skylines 2 is a next-gen title and a complex game on top of that, but that really isn't an excuse. This stuff needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

From a less technical perspective, there are one or two other things that bug me. While the unique interfaces for each service do a good job of explaining where things are going wrong, the Twitter-style pop-ups and the public service announcements are a lot less helpful. Early on, I got repeated announcements about the city experiencing rolling blackouts or water shortages. This was despite the availability of both water and power being as high as it could possibly go. It also didn't seem to be affecting my citizens' happiness at all. I genuinely don't know if that was a glitch of some kind or if I was actually doing something wrong. I never underestimate my own incompetence, but still, it didn't feel right.

Outside that, and a couple of slightly fiddly controls (which I'm sure I'll get the hang of eventually) there really isn't a lot to complain about. This is Cities Skylines, but better. There are even some mechanics, like natural disasters, that were only available as DLC for the first game and are now available out of the box for the sequel. That's more than The Sims would ever do. Paradox has kept the core of the game intact and worked hard on ironing out the kinks, and that's a perfectly valid approach for a game like this. No one wanted or expected any changes to the basic formula.

Despite the technical imperfections (which Paradox has acknowledged), Cities Skylines 2 is still a masterfully crafted jewel in the crown of the city-building genre. There isn't anything else that can match it for breadth or depth right now. This is still the best way to build the city of your dreams.

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