welcome to Cities Skylines 2 Review, a game about which there were many doubts but which in the end turned out to be precisely the management game that many had been waiting for for twenty long years.
The history of city builders is quite brief: the genre was born with the first Sim City, a series that continued to evolve splendidly until the fourth episode in 2003. Sim City 4 is so beautiful to look at, deep to play and modified, that Even today it is the exponent most appreciated by the communities. The absolute mastery of the Maxis masterpiece lasts twelve long years. Something, in fact, began to change in 2015, when Colossal order decides to feast on the remains of 2013's disastrous (but somewhat cutting-edge) Sim City, launching its Cities Skylines.
Building a success
The strength of Colossal Order's first city builder lies essentially in two features: a fallacious, but still futuristic traffic simulation, and the great creative freedom you have to lay out road arteries and lots. With Cities Skylines we have finally been able to create decisive roundabouts, draw neighborhoods full of curves, on maps that have become increasingly larger over time. Has Cities Skylines finally made Sim City 4 obsolete? In a way yes, for example it was a revolution for users who love to draw cities, but those who prefer to manage them and see them evolve organically were left with a bitter taste due to a management mechanic that in the end was not so elaborate. It had limitations and it must be recognized, but it was the first really interesting builder after almost fifteen years of waiting, and in fact the hunger was such that, to date, the Colossal Order game has sold more than twelve million copies between PC and console. The first Cities Skylines is the best-selling Finnish-developed video game of all time.
And now Cities Skylines 2. We feared that this sequel would once again focus on traffic and mobility, leaving aside everything else. The improvements compared to the first chapter are huge and involve almost every aspect of the game.. Let's start with traffic, which has always been the specialty of this software house and its evolution is also one of the graphic aspects that most distinguishes Cities Skylines 2. The most notable innovation is the fact that cars will always be physically present in the simulation. even when not in use. Obviously there are exceptions, but if a resident owns a means of transportation, he or she will also have to worry about where to park it. If there are no designated spaces or free places along the path, the quality of life of the inhabitants will decrease as will their free time, much of which was wasted in reaching the goal on foot. Of course there are public means of transportation: planes, trains, ferries, subways, pedestrian routes, trams and buses will make life in the city more comfortable and noisier. Am bicycles are absent, a very important element that will surely be dedicated to a future update, but there is a nice pedestrian avenue to use when necessary.
Precision signage
To better manage the metropolitan movement of inhabitants, Cities Skylines 2 offers tools to build roads even more powerful and versatile than those seen and appreciated in the first game. In addition to pre-established intersections, we will now have the possibility of inserting roundabouts of various sizes with a simple click: these will also appear automatically when we go, for example, to place a post in the center of the road. This sequel debuts with a large number of roads: dirt roads, double lanes without sidewalks, urban streets with symmetrical and asymmetrical roads. The pinnacle of greatness is the eight-lane, one-way highway. The beauty is how realistically they are connected to each other: the gentle narrowing of the road, the appearance of parking spaces in unused lanes, the immediate and automatic updating of surrounding signs. In addition, it is possible to make small changes that will nevertheless have major repercussions on traffic, such as the insertion of new pedestrian crossings, the prohibition of left turns and the creation of new prohibitions. As it was told? The only limit is your imagination, and at most you rely on a little terraforming (possible and free!) to avoid unrealistic humps and cacophonous height differences on the road.
Cities Skylines 2 has incredible AI
The streets of Cities Skylines 2 can and should be realistic because the AI can now navigate them with extraordinary skill. Each inhabitant you see on the screen decides their route along the way and is able to adapt to any unforeseen events and obstacles. When a resident leaves home because she needs to go shopping, she will decide which means of transportation to use based on factors such as the price of the trip, the speed of arrival and her time availability. If after taking the car this resident finds herself in a traffic jam, depending on her personality, sooner or later she may decide to make a dangerous U-turn and try an alternative route. Forget the drivers of the first Cities Skylines always lined up in a single lane: although it is not always very precise, seeing the vehicles in this sequel maneuver, reverse, dare to overtake is truly something incredible, a level of detail in a simply on a large scale never seen before.
One of the most surprising features is that Drivers can make mistakes too.: that risky overtaking we told you about could not have a happy ending and could cause an accident. In these cases the cars do not suffer dents, but the reaction to the impact is physically realistic and there is always the risk of them catching fire. It is not easy to see an accident live, but when it happens it is always a spectacle with crashes, rollovers and possible carom effects. The best one we witnessed occurred when a motorcycle cut in front of a van and, to avoid it, overturned and landed on a tree in the park at the intersection, where it also ran the risk of setting all the surrounding trees on fire.
Cause and effect
It's about artificial intelligence. Citizens decide what their family needs and go out to buy it, if they need entertainment they go to their favorite place, if they don't have a gas station nearby they will complain on the dedicated screen. Commercial activities, as always, will be divided between low and high density but these include different types of products such as vehicles, clothing, pharmacies and the demand of the inhabitants will be equally diversified. The choice of work by each citizen is no less complex: the distance from home, the cost of travel, vacant positions and the level of education influence. Industries are also divided not only according to density, but also according to the type of goods produced and the resources used; For example, if you have a stone quarry in the city, it is very likely that companies that deal with that specific resource will come forward to occupy the established lots. In the game it is possible to create farms, wheat fields, cotton fields, stone quarries, coal and exploit oil wells. And it's very nice how the activity area of these industries is designed by the player and filled by the system, even if there are some flaws that should be improved.
Urban change
Each virtual day of your virtual city, all virtual inhabitants will make decisions that change the appearance of your creature. Nothing to do with the exponential and relentless growth of the cities of Cities Skylines, which a veteran of the genre can really tame with little effort. It is no coincidence that one of the most used mods in the first game was the one that prevented batches from leveling up, because without it it was almost impossible to have something smaller, peripheral, poor. In Cities Skylines 2 it is no longer a problem: in the largest city that we have had the opportunity to build in the fifty hours of play we have a medium density neighborhood built with all good intentions that does not evolve beyond the second level. , some buildings are abandoned and a small house collapsed because it had been without owner or maintenance for too long. Even some public parks far from downtown were filled with tents as jobs became scarce and home rents soared. The city finally reacts, grows and declines. and it does so by following the decisions of many small virtual inhabitants, of any tourist and of how the players will be able to naturally satisfy their innumerable needs.
Your money
The progression of the game has then become totally "paradoxized", that is, the emphasis is now placed entirely on the journey and Failure is a relative concept.. Especially at the beginning, you cannot fail, because if they are negative, state subsidies will take over, as eventually happens in reality. As the city grows, the subsidy will decrease, consequently increasing what we could define as one of the difficulty curves that, if you want, you can pay attention to. The final result is what I think we all expected: anyone can sit down and create their city, but only the best will be able to achieve certain results and show off the best horizons. So the goal of the game is not just to create the largest metropolis; You can have the same satisfaction by creating, for example, many small towns on the banks of the same river. Each one has their preference, their approach, and there are also those who change in each game. Cities Skylines 2 includes two themes, European and American, which will change the appearance of most buildings, signs and some service cars, and which can also be used simultaneously. Each theme includes unique unlockable buildings, except industrial ones which will be shared between the two.
Città nextgen
Cities Skylines 2 is a truly complex beast. Sim City 4 will forever remain among the classics, its graphics are now like Andy Warhol's Pop Art exactly like any Doom screen, but Colossal Order has finally surpassed the master who remains unique in offering the management of an entire region, but at this point with what precision? Then there will be thousands of mods, the inevitable DLC (but believe me, it already has enough content for hundreds of hours), the patches that will discover all those little bugs that still remain in this endless network of statistics. Likewise, progress will be made in terms of optimization. We know well that many fans of the first Cities Skylines still travel with their PCs from fifteen years ago, but it is impossible to think that all this is available without a cost in terms of hardware. It's not just about the video card, which is still needed, but above all about the RAM and the processor. Even if you are used to associating this definition with the most explosive games, Cities Skylines 2 is it in all aspects. a new generation project with ten years of development ahead and which inevitably requires adequate hardware. However, this does not mean that developers do not have to roll up their sleeves to optimize the performance of a graphics engine that can undoubtedly improve, in fact they are forced to do so if they also want to launch on consoles where it is now expected. in the first half of 2024.
Koyaanisqatsi
Cities Skylines 2 also aspires to greater realism from a graphical point of view. The first's somewhat cartoonish approach was also the result of a modest budget, while the sequel has a lot of richer in details and better proportioned in the scale of buildings and inhabitants, can also boast much more detailed mids with truly surprising reflections for a game of this type, helped by a lighting system that is not perfect, but decidedly impressive. There is also more realism in the passage of time: each day corresponds to a month, and finally we have peak hours (poor CPU!) where most of the inhabitants will take to the streets to get to schools, work and homes. Seeing this orchestra in motion, holding it in your hands, has something magical, it is totally hypnotic as were the experimental films of Godfrey Reggio, the famous trilogy of which Koyaanisqatsi is the progenitor and the frenzy increases with the intervention of man on uncontaminated nature. . . In those films the images were enhanced by Philip Glass' soundtrack, while in Cities Skylines we find three different radios with songs that surprise with quality and variety, and that achieve the difficult task of completely tearing the user away from their reality.
Radio horizons
The radio also includes announcements that will warn us of exceptional events, such as the presence of fires near the city, and will do the same the social squeak which is a kind of Twitter/X where we can read the status of the inhabitants regarding the city. Both tools are very useful to understand in which areas and areas to act, or what exceptional events immediately need our attention, but if the idea is good, the implementation leaves much to be desired: we would have liked to have much more information on traffic, for example . or more dynamism when announcing any impending disaster. For example, why stop the music to announce fires miles away and say nothing about the tornado devouring the highway? The system exists, but it must be improved, just as the actors who have lent themselves to the different voices must be improved.
Touches of class
By now so much has been said about the game that anything we've forgotten is of little importance, perhaps even better if you discover it for yourself as are the many little touches of class present that you can only notice as you spend hours. and hours admiring your creations. Some example? On unlit streets, motorists turn on their high beams to turn them off when another car arrives, residents change their clothes according to the season, temperatures will change dynamically and one winter may be colder than the last, offering heavy snowfall that will make traffic management difficult. However, one of the best things about the game is its fantastic modularity: even the less advanced aspects of Cities Skylines 2, such as the presence of homeless people, are still present and ready to be expanded upon in the future. It's all there, but not everything is at its best yet and will only be as we move forward. But what there is is not little, in fact it is very likely that it is the best of all time.
Conclusions
Holygamerz.com 9.0 Readers (48) 7.8 your voteCities Skylines 2 is the city builder we've been waiting for: beautiful to look at, complex in its systems, extraordinary in the construction and planning tools it offers. Certain technical problems, not very interesting anti-aliasing and an ongoing optimization, are basically the same as the previous game suffered at launch and should not worry you too much. The genre has never offered anything better and we're just getting started. But be careful, we will have to wait a few more weeks for the mods and the map editor. To close, some good news: Cities Skylines 2 is completely in Spanish.
PRO
- This is where the most realistic cities are created.
- You decide, the amazing artificial intelligence of Cities Skylines 2 responds
- For the first time, condominiums and shops at street level on the same lot!
AGAINST
- There is a lack of bicycles, lakes cannot be created and there are no places
- It needs to be optimized much better.
- Citizens with few animations, and not shown using recreational facilities.
