Recent reviews by Micro753

The game is cheap and lots of fun, but I only recommend this game if you have some friends who won't quit the lobby once they're out. The game is so buggy that if someone leaves during the death animation, then often it won't register anyone else's death properly, letting players who should be out continue playing. If someone leaves in the middle of a hand, then half the time it doesn't let a player who should still be in play the next hand. If the host leaves, then you'll most likely get stuck on an infinite loading screen and have to alt+f4 out of the game. If you don't have friends who'll wait, then don't get this game.

After trying Cities Skylines 2 on and off for over a year, I just can’t recommend it over the original. The original is better because it actually has an asset editor (had it from day one as far as I know). You can still make complicated intersections in the sequel, but it’s finicky as heck, and if you misclick even once, you’re never going to get the intersection to look right or sometimes it’ll never function right either. And even after deleting and remaking the intersection dozens of times to finally get an intersection that works, you’ll then have to do it all over again if you want to duplicate the intersection elsewhere (like if you’re making multiple highway exits). In CS1, you can do all the finicky stuff in the asset editor (and roads are way less finicky than in CS2), and once you get the intersection you want, you can save it. Once saved, you can plop the exact same intersection down in less than a second. Zero hassle, zero issues. I can’t believe it’s been well over a year since CS2 released, and it still does not have any kind of asset editor. Not to mention all the other things missing that are here in the original. Just don’t bother with CS2 and get this game instead. CS2 is just a downgrade in everything except graphics (Okay, I guess CS2 does have far better roundabouts. I’ll give them that one.) Plus, there’s Steam Workshop integration with this game but not the sequel, so there’s thousands of free assets and mods for this game.

Things CS2 did better:
-Proper roundabouts
-More realistic building sizes
-Prettier graphics

Things CS1 does better:
-Literally everything else

My must have DLCs:
-After Dark
-Mass Transit
-Industries

My Recommended DLCs:
-Parklife
-Campus
-Snowfall (Only if you really want trams. Everything else in this one is kinda meh.)

Other DLCs I think are okay:
-Green Cities (Mostly just adds new buildings for some variety.)
-Sunset Harbor (Only if you want fishing industry and/or trolleybuses, otherwise not worth it.)
-All the Content Creator Packs (They just add new buildings for some variety.)

All other DLCs are either buggy as heck or just not worth it, IMO.

My must have mods:
-TM:PE
-Intersection Marking Tool
-Node Controller Renewal
-Move It
-Network Anarchy

Other recommended mods:
-Real Time
-Realistic Population
-Parking Lot Roads

And there’s thousands of other mods and assets on the workshop. If there’s something specific you want in the game, odds are there’s a mod/asset already out there.

There's a ton here for just a demo, enough that it feels like a complete game already. And multiplayer makes it even more fun. You can have one person doing the growing and harvesting while someone else makes the sales to clients. Lots of fun already and will definitely be checking out the full game once it releases.

There's something about this game that scratches that zombie itch that no other game does. Not sure I'd recommend it at full price, but definitely half off is worth it.

Edit 2025-04-12: Still cannot make complex road intersections, even with mods. And even if I could, there still is no asset editor, so you have to make every intersection by hand, every single time. Get Cities Skylines 1 instead.

Edit 2024-03-20: Something was changed with the way road placement works. I can increase the length of the left turn lanes without the lane management being all messed up down the road. However, all the other problems remain; the left turning traffic cutting in front of oncoming traffic is the biggest issue now, and there's still no way to change the behavior of the traffic light. I get maybe 3 cars through the intersection before the light changes. Also, still no functioning asset editor; the save and export buttons do nothing, so you have to build the intersection by hand every time. I still cannot recommend this game until traffic control gets better, or at least the default vanilla behavior isn't completely idiotic.



I want to like this game. There’s so much that is done well and improved from the first game; roundabouts actually function properly unlike in the first game, the building upgrades feature is great, city services can be customized to cover specific areas so you don’t have to place fire stations and police stations inside every single neighborhood to have proper coverage, building scale is far more realistic instead of the first game’s ridiculously cartoonish scaling, row-houses are a thing now, etc…

But at the same time traffic, which is fundamental to a city sim game, is so broken that it’s impossible to do anything except the most simple of intersections, and even then it doesn’t always work.
-Drivers often ignore when you ban right/left turns.
-Drivers will drive on pedestrian only roads to take short cuts or to reach their destination instead of parking at a parking lot and walking the rest of the way.
-Traffic lights are useless because protected left turns for both directions will get a green at the exact same time as the straights, causing left turning traffic to turn in front of straight thru traffic, leading to a light that should be capable of letting a hundred cars through actually only getting a dozen through in the same time because of otherwise completely avoidable grid lock.
-If I try to build an intersection where going straight through is impossible (see below example gif) the light will only let one direction turn left even though there is plenty of space in the intersection to let both directions go at the same time. (Kinda the opposite of the above issue. There's no way to select which behavior applies. It isn't random, so there's some kind of logic to when each behavior applies, but I can't find any way to trick the game into doing the behavior I want it to do.)
-The road tools in CS2 seem amazing at first until you start trying to do more complex intersections.
-If you try to merge a lane on a highway, no problem.
-But if you try to merge a lane on a two way street, you often have no control over if the right or left lane is the one that has to merge.
-If you accidentally place a highway in a way that causes the left lane to merge instead of the right, you often have to remove multiple segments of the road just to get that one segment to be correct.
-The only way to have decent traffic is to roundabout everything.

To be fair, the first game also had rather bad vanilla traffic lights, but it was just inefficient instead of being game-breakingly bad like this game. The first game wouldn’t give you a straight thru green light at the same time as the oncoming left turn lane, but the sequel does. This game is just a massive downgrade in terms of traffic management.

For example, here’s an intersection I made in CS1.
https://imgur.com/7y0v4S8
The gif is of optimal traffic flow using TM:PE for better traffic lights and Node Controller Renewal to not have really sharp right turns, but this same intersection still works fine without mods, just at a lower traffic flow due to sub optimal traffic lights and sharper turns making cars slow down more.

Now here’s the best I could do in CS2 when attempting to recreate this same type of intersection.
https://imgur.com/5DVWlIQ
Notice how the left turning traffic never gets its own time for turning; instead, they cut off the oncoming traffic to make their turn instead. I had to break off the right turn lane because the lane merge would always merge the left lane instead of the right. There is no way to manually tell the game which lane should merge. I spent at least 2 hours trying different possible solutions, but nothing works.

And no, I can’t make the left turn lane start earlier because it also messes up the lane merge, forcing the lane that should be a thru lane into ending and screwing up traffic flow just as much because all the thru traffic is forced to merge into one lane.

At the bare minimum, the devs need to fix the vanilla traffic lights to give left turns their own time. Better would be to just implement the features of the TM:PE and Node Controller Renewal mods from CS1.

TL:DR
CS1 was still playable without mods. Broken traffic lights in CS2 makes it impossible to make even slightly complex intersections. If you like complex intersections, especially compact ones, then this game is completely unplayable. Either keep you city a simple grid, or roundabout everything.

I recommend with very large caveats. If you are used to indie games with bugs, and are in the habit of regularly dropping saves, and only if you get the ACE mod off steam workshop (the game is incomplete without it), and if you like micromanage city games. I love this game, but the devs ran out of money for development and aren't updating it anymore. They rushed to fix bugs as much as possible before shutting down development, and the game is now playable, but you still run into the occasional game engine bug that requires reloading a prior save. I have it happen about once every 8 hours or so. With changes to windows 11, the game now has issues launching for me (it sometimes crashes on launch or on clicking something in the main menu), but I just have to retry a few times before it launches fine (most I've had to try is 8 relaunches). It ain't perfect, but at least you don't have to delve into game files to fix it; just relaunch a few times and it sorts itself out somehow. There also is something (memory leak?) that makes the game slow down after 4 or so hours of running. Hearthlings will just stop doing their jobs because the game can't calculate everything. Closing and reopening the game fixes it.

Good news is, they released the code so modders could easily add all the things the devs wanted to. ACE (Authorized Community Expansion) is pretty much required for the game to feel complete. I recommend, but only if you are okay with the things I mentioned above. Worst case, you can always get a refund from Steam.