IGN Reviews Cities: Skylines 2 - The Verdict!

2023-10-21 07:44:28

Cities: Skylines 2 Review - IGN

While the original Cities: Skylines practically brought its breed of open-ended city builder back from the dead (after SimCity 2013 killed it), Cities: Skylines 2 is a sequel that often feels like it took more steps back than it did forward. It's full of exciting and gratifying new mechanics for managing your economy and creating more realistic metropolises. But it also asks you to do a lot of busywork if you don't want the end product to look horrendous on close inspection, and sacrifices some of the user friendliness of its predecessor to fit in more bells and whistles. I’m not ready to tear it all down, but right now there’s an unsightly case of urban blight that’s going to take some major technical renovations to clear up.

I'm going to spend a lot of time criticizing Skylines 2 here, because it is certainly disappointing given what I've come to expect from Colossal Order. But I do need to say up front what Skylines 2 is not – and that's a bad game. It's perfectly serviceable. In some ways it's genuinely innovative and pushes the entire genre forward. I can recommend it pretty easily, as long as you meet its fairly steep technical requirements. My Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 3080 were able to handle it okay on just shy of max settings, even as my cities’ populations were getting into the tens of thousands, but the devs themselves have cautioned that optimization is still a work in progress and they won't hit the benchmarks they were hoping for on a wide variety of hardware by launch.

And I'll get into more of what I think it does right in a bit. But oh boy, there is a lot of unfortunate stuff to get through first.

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THE HOUSE ON UGLY STREET

My single biggest issue with Cities: Skylines 2 is that, if you're not extremely careful about sculpting the terrain beforehand, your commercial, industrial, and low density residential lots will end up looking completely atrocious. Dumpsters leaning at impossible angles. Wood piles floating in the air or clipping into the ground. Parking lots that look like they were painted onto the side of a hill. It really doesn't meet the standards of visual attention to detail I'd expect from a veteran studio that just got done running the bases after a home run of a game in the same genre.

Just to make sure I was being fair, I reinstalled Skylines 1.

The fact that so many of the larger-scale towers and skyscrapers look amazing compounds this problem, because the care and fidelity on display encourages me to zoom in and see my city at street level. There's even a built-in cinematic camera and photo mode for exactly that. Changing seasons can treat you to lovely autumn forests and snowy holiday wonderlands. Why would you go to the trouble of making this signature apartment building so detailed and attractive, and then allow the parking lot across the street to look like something out of an M.C. Escher painting.

What We Said About The Original Cities: Skylines

More than anything, Cities: Skylines is about the simple joy of building. It’s a really impressive and often beautiful simulation, where an amazing number of virtual people go about their business across a huge swath of land. Getting in and creating something is easy, though mastering it will require extensive research on community wikis to understand why growth is stunted even when you address your citizens’ apparent concerns. Don’t expect exciting scenarios or random events, but do expect to be impressed by the scale and many moving parts of this city-builder. – Dan Stapleton, March 10, 2015

Score: 8.5*

*IGN now scores on a 10-point scale instead of 100. To convert the the current system, pretend the second number doesn't exist.

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Read the full Cities: Skylines review

Just to make sure I was being fair, I reinstalled Skylines 1 and looked back over some of my bumpier builds, and there were some little issues with buildings clipping into the terrain. But at least the lots themselves always seemed to be level. The props on them were pointing in the right direction. Building on hills could deform the surrounding terrain significantly, but it looks so much better than what we got in Skylines 2 instead. I simply can't look at a loading dock leading directly to a drop-off into a yawning abyss and call it an overall improvement.

Plus, the lower detail level in Skylines 1 made it so I wasn't scrutinizing everything so closely. It was just charming. And I'm starting to think there might be some value in that. Maybe Skylines 2 has landed in some kind of civic uncanny valley.

KILLDOZER

The second big problem that feeds into this are the pre-made maps that come with Skylines 2, which almost all have very little flat area to build on. Even the river estuary, inspired by real-world Shanghai, which should be pretty flat. The terrain is all out of proportion vertically, as if they multiplied the height of everything to make it look more dramatic at a glance, and far too hilly to host a modern mega-metropolis. That means if you want to avoid those hideous-looking lots, you have to do a tremendous amount of terraforming first. Again, being fair, the land sculpting tools are easy to use and it’s free to move dirt around, which is some consolation. And I suspect once community maps start coming out, there will be some made to be more "builder-friendly." But for now, planning out a new district requires so much grading and leveling that I found it kind of a slog. I wanted a city management game and instead I got bulldozer simulator 2023.

These might seem like nitpicks, and for the first few hours they are. But the whole reason I play these types of games is to make cool-looking, semi-believable cities, and Skylines 2 has made it so much harder for me to do that to my own level of satisfaction than it was in Skylines 1. These issues are always there, throwing a huge, soaking wet blanket on everything else. Weird lighting, bizarre-looking water physics, creepy children, and the fact that my citizens seem to glob together near certain buildings in what I can only describe as a Yoga Homunculus don't help, either.

But hey, the cars, trains, and larger buildings look great. No notes there.

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CIVIC PRIDE

Cities Skylines II Screenshots