Cities Skylines Ii ⟶ 【ESSENTIAL】

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.

In two years, with mods, DLC, and performance fixes, this could be a 9.5/10 masterpiece. Today, it’s an ambitious, frustrating, deeply promising foundation. Buy it if you want to build the foundation now . Wait if you want to live in the finished house. Cities Skylines II

The economy simulation is deep, but the game does a poor job explaining it. Why is your industry failing? Maybe raw materials aren’t reaching them. Maybe too many workers are commuting elsewhere. Maybe a cargo train station is overloaded. The game gives charts and graphs, but not the intuitive alerts of, say, Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic . You’ll spend time guessing. The Bad: Missing Features & Rough Edges Modding Support – “Later” Cities: Skylines lived and breathed on mods. The sequel promised native Paradox Mods integration, but at launch, modding tools (asset editor, map editor, code modding) were absent. Months later, they’ve partially arrived, but it’s nowhere near Steam Workshop’s ecosystem. For a game built on “modders will fix it,” launching without modding is a major wound. The road tools are a delight

Instead of just unlocking buildings by population, you earn “development points” from milestones (e.g., “have 5,000 highly educated citizens”). You choose what to unlock next—a new power plant, a transit hub, or advanced road tools. It gives a sense of strategic choice rather than linear grind. The Mixed: Potential Held Back Performance & Optimization This is the elephant in the room. On release, even high-end PCs (RTX 4090, i9-13900K) struggled to maintain 60fps at 1440p. The game is heavily CPU-bound due to the deep agent simulation—every citizen, every car, every good being tracked. Colossal Order has improved performance with patches (LOD adjustments, occlusion culling), but medium-range systems still see stutter once cities pass 100k population. The game looks good, but not this demanding good. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange

In 2023-24, a modern city builder launching without bicycles or dedicated pedestrian streets is baffling. The first game had them (via DLC, but still). Here, citizens walk on sidewalks, but you can’t build bike lanes or car-free zones without workarounds. For a game that prides itself on traffic simulation, ignoring micromobility is a strange gap.