Stairway to Heaven or Highway to hell?
Cities Skylines 2 landed recently and as a huge fan of both simulation and builder games, I was very excited to jump in and try it out. Was it worth the excitement? Let's find out!
I will start here with an upfront on my PC specs. I have an Nvidia 3080TI GPU, a Ryzen 9 5950x CPU and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. So it's no sluggish heap in dire need of replacement anytime soon. Unless of course, you decide to play Cities Skylines 2.
Loading into the game and any movement was instantly very janky. Simply panning the camera looked more like a slideshow than it did the latest and greatest in city building. After turning the graphics down from high to medium and the resolution down from 4k to 1440p we started to get a little closer but, in the end, resulted in 1080p. While graphics in this type of game do not need to be in 4k the settings were automatically selected. This was also before any building had taken place. This shows very poor optimisation however this is also likely something that can easily be rectified in a later patch update. While upsetting for now I have no doubts this will be addressed in some later update the only question is when and if it is worth playing until then.
Settings dialled back I proceeded through the tutorial. It was a very nice and welcoming tutorial which seemed to hold my hand enough to not let me get anything wrong while still allowing free placement and some user input rather than a set pathway. The tutorial I found did a great job of getting me going and setting me on the right pathway however those brand new to the game may have some different opinions on this and if you do, please let me know in the comments below.
I found the gameplay very enjoyable during my testing. I was easily losing hours at a time trying to create little communities and thoughtfully placing industrial sections away from residential to reduce air pollution while maintaining those transportation links to my cities. I enjoyed the map choices available although I did focus on “Archipelago Haven” There is a total of 10 to choose from at the time of writing.
Progression felt steady while building up. Enough to work towards but it never felt like an all-out “grind” to be getting to the next level and unlocking the next batch of buildings. I didn’t seem to suffer too many money problems either. I started to get close at one stage however I then unlocked the next level and was gifted a cool mill to congratulate me which got me right back on track.
Overall I enjoyed my time in Cities Skylines 2, however, it is worth noting that the steam prices are currently £41.99 for the standard edition and then a whopping £74.99 for the Ultimate edition. Which at these prices does make the game a little hard to recommend in its current state. Those of us with Xbox Game Pass however can enjoy from day 1 which is how I accessed the game. So if you’re a fan of city builders and have a Game Pass account this is something you will want to check out. If you don’t have Game Pass, I would maybe either wait for a sale or bear in mind that some further optimisation patches are going to be needed to bring this game up to a 2023 expectation.