Cities: Skylines II

The underlying simulation here is more sophisticated than the first game in every measurable way, and for the first fifteen hours that is exciting. Citizens have individual jobs, individual homes and individual commutes. Traffic behaves like traffic. Then your city reaches sixty thousand people, the frame rate halves, and you realise the simulation is not merely detailed but detailed in ways nothing is done with.

The good idea underneath

Roads are the core and they are excellent. Building them is smoother, intersections are generated intelligently, and the underlying pathfinding produces congestion that has causes you can actually diagnose. The economy is deeper too — supply chains between industries are modelled properly rather than abstracted into a demand bar.

If this ran well and had the content, it would be the definitive city builder.

Largest city

112,000 citizens

Frame rate at that size

Around 25 fps

Hours before performance ended the run

~20

Performance is not a footnote here

In a genre where the entire progression is city size, performance is the game. A builder that cannot render a large city cannot deliver its own late game. At launch this ran badly on hardware far above its recommended specification, and while patches have improved matters substantially, the fundamental cost of simulating every citizen individually has never fully been paid down.

I stopped both of my cities not because I had finished but because they had become unpleasant to look at.

Where it slips

The content is also thinner than the first game after a decade of expansions, which is an unfair comparison to make and an unavoidable one when the sequel costs more. Public transport options are reduced. Landmarks are few. And the promised modding and asset tools arrived late enough that the community which sustained the original had largely gone back to it.

The verdict

Forty-one hours and I have gone back to the first game, which is the only verdict that matters in a genre this dependent on time invested. The bones here are better and the house is unfinished.

Check the current performance situation before buying. This is a review of a specific moment in a game that is still being repaired.