Cities: Skylines II — ReviewA living mega-city simulation with a genuinely deep core, but a catastrophic launch and thinner-than-the-original content keep its ambition from landing on day one.

Cities: Skylines II earns its best moment not when a skyscraper tops out, but the first time you flip the overhead view to the population-and-age overlay. The grid of roads and towers dissolves into something stranger: a crowd of people who grow old, move house, and trudge to work, color bands drifting across the screen like a city's medical scan. Colossal Order never wanted you to build a pretty town. It handed you a system that throws tantrums on its own schedule, and dared you to keep it running.

Then October 24, 2023 happened, and the ambition tripped over its own feet. An RTX 4090 squeezed out 20fps at native 4K/high; an RX 7900XTX wheezed at 7 to 12fps — and the studio's answer was that a 30fps cap was the plan all along. A game built for slow, patient stewardship instead forced everyone to fight the graphics menu before laying a single road. Sixty-thousand-plus Steam reviews and a 55% positive score wrote the verdict in two words: Mixed feelings, fully earned.

Stretch the timeline, though, and the picture refuses to stay damning. The deep simulation, the supply-and-demand ledger, the rebuilt traffic model — that foundation is genuinely strong. A year on, the Economy 2.0 rework and a steady drip of patches dragged the game upward at a pace you could watch in real time. What this review wants to untangle is exactly that fracture: a sequel aimed in precisely the right direction, standing on a foundation that wasn't ready — and whether you should walk into it today.

There is no plot, and that is the smartest thing about it

Set the word "story" aside for a moment, because this sequel has almost no main thread in the conventional sense, and that absence is the right call. A city-builder that bolts a hero's journey onto its front end usually feels like dropping a slab of cream cake into a simmering hot pot — not necessarily inedible, but pointed in the wrong direction. Colossal Order clearly understood this, and handed the entire narrative weight back to the act of running the place itself.

So the "story" lives inside the systems. You are not reading a script; you are watching a city grow a personality out of empty ground. Early on you care about nothing but power and roads. By the mid-game you are forced to wrangle industrial resource coverage and public services. Late, you finally touch the tangle where taxation, budget, and infrastructure all pull on one another. That arc from small town to mega-city is itself a wordless narrative line, and the reason it sticks is that you become its only author. Every decision is answered by the city, hours later, in a chain of consequences nobody scripted. A bad industrial layout becomes an unemployment wave. A crooked arterial road throttles the whole place at rush hour. That cause-and-effect is how the game tells its tale, and it gives every city a development history that belongs to you alone.

What makes this approach smart is that it works with the genre rather than against it. The pleasure of city-building has always been the act of wrestling order out of chaos with your own hands, not passively receiving a prewritten arc of joy and sorrow. By staking everything on the systemic chain of cause and effect, this game makes you the sole author of the tale, and it lets every city carry a development history that is yours and yours alone, impossible to replicate. That authorship is the single largest reward it bought by walking away from a conventional main thread, and it is why a sandbox with no plot can still feel more personal than a story-driven game with a dozen cutscenes.

The population overlay turns data into a city novel

The real vessel for this game's storytelling is that population-and-age overlay. Open it and the abstract numbers turn into the lifeblood of a place: which district is aging, which one keeps drawing in young arrivals, how the commuter tide pours from homes to industry each morning and floods back at dusk. Information that ought to be dry — service coverage, age distribution, traffic flow — congeals into a second kind of fiction, a novel written in heat maps rather than dialogue.

You will not remember a line of scripted dialogue, but you might remember a single winter frame: a train slipping through a snowed-in forest toward the edge of a city you just finished wiring up, the moment it dawns on you that this place has finally connected to the outside world. That sense of evolution is the most quietly affecting thing here, and it carries a real emotional temperature. Watching a residential block you planned light up window by window at dawn, then empty out as the commute begins, breeds an almost pet-like attachment. The flip side is that this kind of narrative charges a price of admission. The game quietly assumes you already love the genre, that you will lean in and read the cause and effect the systems spin out rather than sit back and wait to be entertained. For a newcomer raised on plot-heavy games, the empty hush of an opening where nobody hands you an objective can be an instant bounce. You remember which district you clawed through in the lean early hours, which railway you laid overnight to break a brutal jam. Those personal memories outlast any screenwriter's beat, because you and the city lived them together. The catch is honest and worth stating plainly: if you want explicit goals, character arcs, or a driving plot, this game gives you almost nothing. Its narrative is abstract, demanding, and front-loads its barrier to entry — which is exactly why opinion on it splits so cleanly down the middle.

A low-profile presence that never drops the ball

The audio in Cities: Skylines II is the kind you can play for dozens of hours and still struggle to praise outright, while also failing to find anything genuinely wrong with it. Look at the roughly 60 reviews on OpenCritic or the long retrospectives from outlets like Gamersky, and barely anyone bothers to make the music or the sound design a talking point. That silence is itself the verdict: this was never the headline act. You will rarely stop because a track caught you, and you would be hard-pressed to name a single cue that changed a decision you made.

But low-profile is not the same as bad here. The sound of a city-builder is more like air than like a soundtrack: nobody mentions it on a normal day, and everybody would notice the instant it vanished. The score leans light, gentle, and built for the long loop, sitting underneath the city to hold its atmosphere without stealing focus. Whether you are paving roads, dragging zones, tuning the budget, or switching overlays, the audio holds a steady "enough, and pleasant" register. For a game you measure in dozens or hundreds of hours, the simple feat of never grating on you is itself an accomplishment.

Functional music, made on purpose

That restraint is a deliberate trade, not an oversight. City-building is a hyper-focused genre — you stare at the screen for long stretches, planning, balancing ledgers, untangling routes, your brain running hot the whole time. In that state, a score that is too aggressive, too eager to assert itself, becomes a distraction rather than a companion. This game's music clearly grasps that, and willingly retreats into the background as a soft tonal floor so your attention can stay on the city.

Think of it as functional music in the truest sense: its goal is not to be remembered but to let you forget the time and sit happily inside your city for an entire evening. From that angle, its modesty is proof of competence rather than a shortfall. The ambient layer deserves a specific nod too. Push the camera down to street level and the engine hum of traffic, the rhythm of signals, and the small scuffle of pedestrians stack into something that makes the place feel lived-in rather than staged — exactly in tune with the game's "breathing city" pitch.

Competent, but never the deciding factor

Placed inside this game's wider predicament, the audio gets the scale right. The relationship between sound and image in a city sim is like salt in cooking: too much and it cloys, too little and it falls flat, and this game at least lands on the correct pinch. The problem is that when a game's visuals are taking a beating and its systemic ambition is this loud, a "competent but unremarkable" soundtrack has no leverage to pull the overall score upward.

To pin the blame on the audio for being quiet would be unfair, though. The real fault lines here run through performance and presentation, and when a game's central conflicts are that prominent, any flawless supporting system gets reflexively ignored. The audio is precisely that — a silent passer of the test. It never drags the experience down and never yanks you out of immersion at your most invested. In a launch state this troubled, that alone is no small thing, which is why a steady, middling, do-no-harm score is exactly what it deserves.

From altitude, the only pitch nobody can argue with

Pull the camera up high and let an entire city fan out beneath you, and the visual case for Cities: Skylines II holds together. The scale has grown a clear notch over the original, and when a dense modern cluster, an airport, a port, and a wall of high-rises share a single frame, you finally get the "this is a real metropolis" heft the first game only gestured toward. A rainy district at night earns its keep too — headlights, signals, and pedestrian flow layering up not as a tech demo but as a city starting to speak for itself.

The trouble is that a city-builder's visual test was never up at altitude; it lives the moment you zoom in. Down at street level the seams stop hiding. Terrain fitting and lot generation carry obvious flaws, with buildings, parking lots, and vehicles floating or clipping all over the place. The sense of order you spent hours assembling shatters the instant a house punches through a hillside. It is a film that spent a fortune on its set, then let the camera catch the edge of the soundstage — not ugly, just exposed. That sting cuts deeper in this genre than most, because the whole payoff here is your appetite for control: you align the roads, the zones, the greenery, chasing that "everything is in its right place" cleanliness, and a single clipping car undoes the spell exactly where you most wanted to show off.

A performance disaster: plain visuals, hardware drained

The biggest visual problem, though, is not the art at all — it is the performance. Multiple outlets called the launch optimization one of the roughest technical states a major game has shipped in on any platform. The numbers tell it cold: at native 4K/high an RTX 4090 managed 20fps, the RX 7900XTX 7 to 12fps; at 1440p/high the only card on the market that could hold past 60fps was the RTX 4090; and at 4K/high no card ran it smoothly at all.

What baffled everyone was the mismatch between cost and image. The visual style is genuinely plain, nothing like a top-tier ray-traced spectacle, yet it devoured hardware utterly out of proportion. Players later dug up part of the culprit: the game was rendering details like teeth on citizens far away and barely visible, with almost no effective level-of-detail culling. You paid a ray-tracing-blockbuster price in hardware and tuning, and got back a plain, occasionally clipping, occasionally shimmering picture — that dislocation is the root reason this dimension scores lowest in the whole review. Worse, the damage is chronic rather than momentary. It is not the odd dropped frame in a tense beat; it is a steady drag across hours of immersive play. The bigger your city grows, the more citizens and cars it holds, the further the framerate slides, until late-stage metropolises can stutter to the edge of unplayable. The more you invest and the more your city succeeds, the harder the game punishes you — a brutal feedback loop for a title built on long-term stewardship.

"The 30fps cap is by design" — the line that lit the fuse

Worst of all was the studio's posture. Facing a wall of performance complaints, Colossal Order said publicly that it had targeted 30fps because "there's no real benefit to aim for higher" in a city-builder. The reasoning is not absurd on its face — the genre genuinely does not lean on high refresh the way a shooter does. But players set it next to the measured data and the two refused to reconcile: if it were truly tuned around 30fps, a flagship card should at least lock that line comfortably, not fail to even reach it.

So "targeting 30fps" read, to the community, as a cover story for an optimization failure, and the trust crisis caught fire. The saving grace is that this wall was never permanent. After the first performance patch an RTX 4090 reached around 40fps at 4K/high, and a year of continued optimization clawed the frames back piece by piece. So I land on calling the visual problem one of severe incompleteness rather than wrong direction. The art foundation and the sense of urban scale have real value; it was the technical bedrock at launch that simply could not carry the ambition resting on it.

The keyword is not "more," it is "heavier"

The single most useful thing about how Cities: Skylines II plays is that the upgrade over its predecessor is not "more," it is "heavier." Economic management, urban simulation, infrastructure — the core systems are all denser and more entangled than before. There are more judgment calls to make, and the sense that tugging one thread pulls the whole fabric is far stronger. That weight is the most seductive thing about it: you are no longer arranging a pretty model, you are operating a system that genuinely bites back.

The clearest expression of that heft is zoning the yellow industrial blocks by resource coverage in the industry view. You have to weigh how long that patch's resources will last, whether transport can keep up, how much pollution and commuter strain its distance from housing will cost. In that instant you are not placing tiles, you are keeping a long-term ledger for your city. It is the difference between decoration and consequence: every block you drop is a bet on the city's future shape, and the simulation will collect on that bet whether you remembered to plan for it or not. The supply-and-demand loop and the rebuilt traffic system are the consensus highlights, and most outlets agree the underlying simulation sits near the top of the genre. The traffic rework especially deserves a callout: where the original often reduced traffic to a number you nudged, this game models it as a traceable reality — every citizen has an origin, a destination, and a route they re-pick when congestion bites. A bad road design stacks visible queues across your city; a clever interchange or bus line genuinely unclogs the flow. That visible cause and effect is the essence of the game's depth.

The friendlier opening, and the tedium on its flip side

Credit where it is due: the early pacing is friendlier. Being able to import power from a neighboring city sounds minor but materially eases the suffocation of the opening, sparing you from spending the first hours just plugging power leaks. It is one of the rare spots where this game clearly got usability right, and it sets a more welcoming tone than the original ever managed. Little concessions like that matter more than they look, because they decide whether a newcomer survives the first hour or quits in frustration; this game, at least at the start, finally extends a hand instead of a test.

Once the systems stack, though, the bill comes due: micromanagement balloons. Plenty of actions are not hard, just granular — granular enough that, at times, you are not making a decision so much as cleaning up after the last one. Editing complex road layouts is the worst offender, a layer-by-layer ritual of adjusting, patching lines, and fixing junctions that turns into the city-planning equivalent of nudging alignment in a slide deck. The fine line here is between depth and tedium. Ideal complexity yields meaningful choices; too much of this is meaningless labor, friction born purely of clumsy tools. Depth is addictive, tedium is exhausting, and this game stirs the two together. If it could keep the systemic depth while automating the repetitive busywork away with smarter tools, the whole experience would climb another rung — and that unrealized headroom is one reason it stops short of an even higher score despite leading the review. The split in how players receive it falls along exactly this seam: people who love complex systems find the ambition exhilarating, while people who prize a smooth hand find the friction grinds their patience down. Set it against the genre and its lane comes into focus: Anno 1800 builds depth from precise supply chains, the SimCity line frames itself around zoning and service coverage, Banished commits to small-scale frontier survival. This game bet instead on scale plus living-population realism — a breathing mega-city where you watch residents age, relocate, and commute as one flow. That differentiation is its soul, and the reason it takes the review's top score, even as fiddly micromanagement and technical drag keep that depth from reaching every player cleanly. It is a tool for creators, not a toy for idle evenings, and which of those two you are will more or less decide how you feel about the way it plays.

It genuinely holds a full city's growth

If one quality lands without an asterisk, it is that Cities: Skylines II truly holds the entire growth of a city. Not just bigger maps, though the maps are bigger — the expansion curve from a sleepy town to a sprawling mega-city is unusually legible. Early on you watch power and roads. Mid-game you manage industrial resource coverage and public services. Late, you wrestle the interlock of taxation, budget, and infrastructure. Each stage hands you a fresh problem, and the city sprouts its own objectives without ever needing a quest list.

This is content that grows out of the systems rather than being propped up by a checklist, and it is the genre's highest form of content design. The game does not bolt on hundreds of hand-placed tasks to fill your time; it lets the city's own logic keep throwing problems at you. Population climbs, schools run short. Industry booms, pollution overshoots. Commerce thrives, parking collapses. Solving one problem usually uncovers the next, so there is always a next move. For players wired this way the content is effectively bottomless, because its ceiling is set not by a designer but by your own patience and ambition. A city can keep growing until you decide to stop.

That structure also sidesteps the trap that sinks so many open-ended games: content that feels padded. There are no filler collectibles here, no markers sprinkled across the map to inflate a playtime figure. The work you do is always the work the city actually needs, which means the hours never feel hollow. It is the rare kind of "content" that respects your time precisely by refusing to manufacture busywork, and it is the deepest reason the game stays compelling long after a campaign-driven title would have run out of road.

The content cut at launch was the sharpest slap

But place it beside the original and the problem surfaces at once — and it is this game's most damning flaw: the sequel launched with less content than the original's then-current version.

You have to understand city-builder players to feel the sting. The first Cities: Skylines had years of updates and Workshop accumulation behind it, a community that built a vast library of themed buildings and mods, content long since fully fledged. The sequel arrived with no Workshop support and a baffling land-value system — to veterans who came up through the original, it felt like being marched back to a starting line from years ago. The first paid DLC, Beach Properties, poured fuel on the fire: its pricing and thin content sparked enough outrage that Paradox ultimately refunded every buyer and reissued it for free. In AAA publishing, a developer voluntarily owning the mistake and refunding is genuinely rare, which is exactly the measure of how real the "you sold DLC before fixing the base game" anger was.

A year later: patches and mods refilled the well

The good news is that this game's content grows. Across its first year the team did two big things: Economy 2.0 tore the entire economic model down and rebuilt it for more transparency and challenge, fixing along the way the "death waves" that periodically collapsed a city's population; and it clawed the launch's disastrous optimization back, frame by frame.

More importantly, the modding ecosystem finally arrived. With Paradox Mods open, the platform has gathered nearly 7,900 mods, and the studio shipped four free asset packs — France, Germany, the UK, and Japan — adding three to four hundred building assets. The game once mocked for shipping thinner than its predecessor refilled its content through a year of sustained work.

It is worth being precise about what that recovery does and does not fix. A growing content offering can repair the size of the package, but it cannot retroactively repair a first impression. The 55% Steam score is, in part, a fossil record of launch-day frustration that no patch can edit away. So the honest read is split: as a thing to buy today, the content depth is finally respectable; as a chapter in the game's history, the launch shortfall remains a scar. Its content value rests on your willingness to walk the long road of updates with it, and for the player who paid full price at launch and hit an empty shell, "it's much better now" cannot soothe the disappointment of back then.