When you think of city builders over the last decade, there’s only one name that still comes to mind: Cities: Skylines. The breakout success for Colossal Order and (at the time) the biggest game launch Paradox Interactive had ever seen, it’s effectively came to represent the entire genre, as other city builder franchises faded away. Having gone hands on with the game, Cities: Skylines 2 looks set to repeat the feat and cement itself at the top of the genre.
A city builder starts with the road-laying tools, and Cities: Skylines 2 refines and expands upon the already pretty solid offerings of the first game. The fundamentals will be instantly familiar and usable for anyone that played the original, from placing straight roads on a strict grid to putting in curves and winding sections with just a few quick clicks, but there’s some new and exciting options to be found as well. Asymmetrical roads give you three lanes split unevenly between directions, catering better to heavier directional traffic or letting you siphon off from a route with a bespoke turning lane, going hand in hand with the more intelligent traffic AI. You can also now add alleyways to enhance your New York-style cities (and you can also place a quick grid, if you like) or place pedestrianised roads if you want to be more European, and roundabouts are an actual feature instead of an awkward collection of curving road sections.
Oh, and those roads are automatically plumbed for water and sewage, and wired for electricity, smoothing out some of the busywork that accompanied every early game and city expansion in the original. Then again, there’s some new tasks and quirks to get accustomed to with the other utilities. Pipes and cables don’t run through bridges, so you need to separately handle those, hiding them underground unless you fancy creating an eyesore, and you need to cable up remote wind turbines to the grid instead of just having them within range of some pylons or buildings. Maybe you don’t want to deal with either of the pollution of fossil fuels or the visuals of green energy, in which case you can connect up to electrical pylons that bring power in from other cities, though this comes at a higher production cost that you’ll need to cover with taxes and industry.
As your city grows you’ll gradually unlock new public services – from police to fire fighters, healthcare to deathcare – and while the basic options will appear as your city grows, the larger and improved version tie into a deeper progression system. Where the original was just about population count, now you’re also looking to perform specific feats and goals with your city as it grows, going from a village to town, city, and up to a vast megalopolis. Each tier brings new milestones to shoot for, which then grants you Development points to spend on acquiring new building types. In essence, there’s a sprawl of mini tech trees now in the game.
It’s a relatively small sounding thing, but feels more meaningful for helping you to design and specialise your city. You always had the transport links that fed trade, industry and businesses of your city in the original, but now these are intended to be more meaningful. There’s more nuance and depth to the underlying systems that allow businesses to come into your city and flourish, the supply chains, the way goods are imported and exported and more. It’s something that I couldn’t even touch upon within the hour-long preview session, but I’m keen to dig into more when I get more hands on time, and especially trying to push for something like an agricultural city instead of the typical jack-of-all-trades that I’d always end up with in the first game.
There’s now building upgrades, so a school can be expanded with an additional wing that allows for more students, a library to improve performance, and a sports field that would make any US college sports programme envious. Landfill sites can grow to accommodate the vast amounts of trash that your city produces, but also be improved with recycling stations and hazardous waste handling.
There’s a bunch of features and building types that were only added in DLC for the first game that are included from the off with this sequel – day-night cycles, natural disasters, prisons, and so on – but that doesn’t mean Colossal Order don’t have ways to expand this game through DLC. They already revealed Expansion Pass will include the Bridges & Ports pack, adding more features to make yours a bustling port city, and making the water’s edge look more realistic. After all the awkward-looking waterside houses and buildings I zoned for in the original game, I’m looking forward to having prettier looking beaches.
And then there’s the core technical improvements that Cities: Skylines 2 can make compared to a game and game engine from eight years ago. It will make far better use of CPU cores, in turn allowing for the city maps to be five times larger – oh, and they’re now sub-divided into smaller grid squares, giving so much more flexibility for how your city spreads and you add small towns – there’s better traffic AI that will automatically reroute to avoid the endless traffic jams, there’s the ability to track and follow specific citizens as they go through their lives, and more.
Cities: Skylines 2 is shaping up to be a pretty much a perfect example of a sequel. This isn’t some kind of crazy social experiment in city planning like Milton Keynes, but more like a city centre redevelopment plan that carefully looks to retain so much of the culturally significant builds and places, while also bringing so much modernisation alongside.
Cities: Skylines 2 is set for release on 24th October across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
