Cities Skylines Ii -

The road tools are a delight. Parallel roads, asymmetrical lanes, roundabouts, traffic lights, stop signs, lane connectors—you can micro-manage every intersection. Traffic AI is smarter: vehicles change lanes earlier, use slip lanes, and actually obey lane arrows. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange without downloading 17 mods.

Here’s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines II as of its launch window and early updates. When Cities: Skylines launched in 2015, it resurrected the city-builder genre from a long SimCity slumber. Nearly a decade later, Colossal Order returns with a sequel promising true next-gen urban simulation. No more fake traffic, no more city size limits, no more agent limits. Cities: Skylines II aims for the stars—but arrives with engine trouble. The Good: A Living, Breathing Metropolis Scale and Seamlessness The first game felt like a collection of tiles. Here, you unlock tiles gradually, but the potential map is enormous—over 150 square kilometers. You can build a farming outpost, a distant airport, and a downtown core without a single loading screen. More importantly, the city feels contiguous. Citizens don’t despawn; they commute, get stuck, find alternate routes, and even move if their commute is too long. That alone changes everything. Cities Skylines II

It’s a brilliant simulation buried under technical debt. When everything works—when you watch raw ore travel by train to a smelter, then to a parts factory, then to a tool shop, then to a hardware store, and a citizen buys a hammer to upgrade their home— Cities: Skylines II is unmatched. But too often, you’re fighting performance, missing features, or unclear feedback loops. The road tools are a delight

The art style is more realistic but also flatter. Buildings have better texture detail, but the global lighting can feel washed out. Worse, forced Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) creates noticeable ghosting and softness in motion. There’s no native resolution rendering option. Mods can help, but vanilla visuals range from “pleasant” to “muddy” depending on time of day and weather. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange

Snow isn’t cosmetic. Snowplows become a service; road maintenance matters. Leaf cleanup in autumn, heatwaves increasing electricity demand, thunderstorms causing localized flooding—the environment pushes back in fair, interesting ways.