Cities: Skylines II review – Lake expectations

Between arachnid-themed heroes experiencing a close encounter of the venomous kind, the long-awaited return of a novelist trapped in a world of nightmares, and Nintendo releasing a license to print money on its Switch console, you’d need a pretty interesting game to tear you away from one of the biggest blockbuster months in recent history.

How do you compete with superheroes, survival-horror, and a rare Super Mario Bros. 2D adventure that invites you to ride a warp pipe inchworm? By giving your fans the chance to play municipal god. I’m talking thoughtful suburban designs with a European feel, lanes of tarmac that prevent traffic jams, and balancing the power needs of a growing populace with an absolute timesink of bureaucratic brilliance. In my best Richard Attenborough voice, I shall only say, welcome, to Cities: Skylines II.

If you’re wondering how a game about urban planning can give the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Resident Evil 4’s glorious remake a run for its collective AAA money, hear me out. What you’ve got here is a direct sequel to a beloved city management game that grew from humble small town operator to gargantuan metropolis over the years. The original Cities: Skylines game is also a game with a heavy amount of DLC to collect, literally dozens of pieces split between small add-ons, massive expansions, and even music packs. Basically a live-service zoning approval simulator, the full experience is something that you can sink an ungodly amount of time into in its present state.

Which is why in a bizarre way, I’m kind of happy that Cities: Skylines II is going back to square one after pushing the mother of all F5 keys.

This is a sequel that sweeps its own board clear, and it’s a risky move to ask fans to give up all the creature comforts that have come from years of DLC releases, and ask them to invest in a game that admittedly offers less in terms of raw content. But here’s the thing: Cities: Skylines II might be a smaller game if you think of it purely in terms of add-ons like radio stations, environmentally-friendly architecture, and Chinese design influences, but the core DNA of the sequel is one that operates on both micro and macro scales.

It is a staggering feat of achievement here from developer Colossal Order; pure scale that never ceases to impress with the visual splendor that you’re capable of crafting. And yet there’s a paradox to this design. Look closer and you’ll spot subtle gaps in the wealth of construction options available for you. It feels like they’re waiting to be filled in by a convenient slice of DLC.

On top of that, a word of warning to anyone looking to play the game on PC because there’s going to be a rough period of optimization ahead of you. Even with my rig, in which I’m fielding a pretty decent RTX 3070 that should be capable of intruding on the heavens with my Manhattan-inspired skyline, I was chugging along on anything but the lowest of settings. I actually held off on going live with this review after a launch-ready patch was introduced to the game, but it did little to address major technical issues that pushed my PC to dangerously hot levels. There’s hot, and then there’s “attracting Finnish businessmen for a sauna” hot, which is what Skylines II did to my machine.

Sub-optimal graphics and growing pains aside, I’m keeping Cities: Skylines II installed on my PC for the time being. I can see it shaping up to be a cathartic slice of metropolitan planning for diorama enthusiasts like myself. What it has going for it right now, even if it does feel like an iterative upgrade over the first game, are a number of quality-of-life upgrades, an incredibly well-realised scale of micro-management, and thoughtful changes that allow you to truly define the identity of your city as you use every available square meter of space to your advantage.

It makes for a game that can be overwhelming at first, as progress leads to the acquisition of greater swathes of land, more management catastrophes to overcome, and budgetary hurdles to clear while keeping the clockwork mechanisms of your city running smoothly.

For now though, there’s a long-term view to take when scoping out the latest successor to Wil Wright’s SimCity legacy. There’s work to be done, post-launch optimization to look forward to, and some buildings need to be trimmed down from impossibly gargantuan to realistically manageable before I feel comfortable placing them next to my carefully curated collection of neighborhoods. But as far as the foundational work goes, there’s a lot of potential here for an all-time great city-building game.

Cities: Skylines II releases for PC and PC Game Pass on 24 October. The game will come to console in 2024.