Cities: Skylines II

The short version

The bones of the best city builder ever made, still waiting for the muscle. Years of patches have fixed the worst of the launch — performance is finally acceptable and the economy rework helped — but dig into the simulation and you'll still find corners being cut where the first game, with all its mods, had depth. We've re-sniffed this one since launch, and the score has climbed. It hasn't finished climbing to where the potential is.

Building

Let's start with what's genuinely superb, because it is genuinely superb: the road tools are the best the genre has ever seen. Drawing a highway interchange by hand — with proper elevation, smooth curves, and traffic that actually reads your lane logic — is the game at its absolute peak. Terrain sculpting, surface painting, and the sheer scale of the maps (hundreds of square kilometers of buildable land) make the pure act of building better here than anywhere else, full stop.

The detail density rewards it, too. Zoom to street level and cims carry shopping bags, delivery vans stop at loading bays, and your city sounds different at night than at noon. When it all comes together at sunset over a district you shaped by hand, this game produces screenshots nothing else in the genre can match.

Simulation

Here's where the snout wrinkles. The individual-citizen simulation this game was sold on frequently doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Demand bars contradict themselves, industries carry on happily with no workers, education pipelines produce strange outcomes, and the economy — even after the much-advertised rework — has a way of balancing itself whether you play cleverly or carelessly.

That last point is the deep problem: it's very hard to actually fail. A city builder without meaningful failure states is a beautiful screensaver with extra steps, and after a certain population size the game stops pushing back entirely. The first game's traffic could strangle a badly planned city to death; this one mostly forgives you and moves on.

Performance & the road here

We'd be lying if we pretended the launch didn't happen. This game shipped in a state that made review scores look generous, and the DLC pace in year one outran the bug-fix pace, which the herd does not forget. Credit where due: the patches kept coming, the economy rework was real, modding support arrived, and on current mid-range hardware the game now runs acceptably at sensible settings. "Acceptably" three years in is not a triumph — but it's no longer the disaster it was.

Craft — 7.0

The building tools are 9-nostril work. The simulation underneath them is not. Average of a masterpiece and a shrug.

Hold — 5.8

We built three cities and stopped at around 35 hours — not because we ran out of tools, but because the game stopped resisting. Builders who play for the sculpture will stay for hundreds of hours; builders who play for the puzzle will drift.

The verdict

One nostril, trending upward. Worth it on a deep sale if you love the building more than the managing — and plenty of the herd does. We'll keep re-sniffing as the patches land.