Cities: Skylines II

Game
    Review

Cities: Skylines II (2023) is a city-building simulation that extends the first game's revival of detailed and ambitious urban planning of the Sim City games. You zone buildings, place roads, set taxation and provide public services and public transportation. The aim is to do this while also maintaining your budget, health, employment, and pollution levels.

The game offers a more detailed simulation than the previous game. The realism of this simulation is increased, particularly in the area of commerce and resources. You can now manage the resources you need to build, power and feed the city which not only adds farming aspects to the game but bases your ambitions on the reality of limited materials.

As you progress, you can take advantage of the more powerful tools to lay out roads and trains. Through stats, dashboards and infographics you can see realistic traffic congestion, pollution, electric and water supply. There are also new systems to make the seasons change over time in your city and the citizens also behave differently depending on the time of day. Other nice touches this time around are mixed-use buildings that offer commercial at street level with housing in the apartments above.

The result is a game that creates the child-like joy of a toy city but then scales that to huge proportions of adult ambition and complexity. It offers an open world that can host the daily routines of nearly a million unique citizens while presenting this to the player via an understandable interface.

Our examiner, Jo Robertson, first checked Cities: Skylines II 5 weeks ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 5 weeks ago.