Cities Skylines Ii May 2026

Here’s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines II as of its launch window and early updates. When Cities: Skylines launched in 2015, it resurrected the city-builder genre from a long SimCity slumber. Nearly a decade later, Colossal Order returns with a sequel promising true next-gen urban simulation. No more fake traffic, no more city size limits, no more agent limits. Cities: Skylines II aims for the stars—but arrives with engine trouble. The Good: A Living, Breathing Metropolis Scale and Seamlessness The first game felt like a collection of tiles. Here, you unlock tiles gradually, but the potential map is enormous—over 150 square kilometers. You can build a farming outpost, a distant airport, and a downtown core without a single loading screen. More importantly, the city feels contiguous. Citizens don’t despawn; they commute, get stuck, find alternate routes, and even move if their commute is too long. That alone changes everything.

Snow isn’t cosmetic. Snowplows become a service; road maintenance matters. Leaf cleanup in autumn, heatwaves increasing electricity demand, thunderstorms causing localized flooding—the environment pushes back in fair, interesting ways. Cities Skylines II

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. Here’s a detailed, long-form review of Cities: Skylines

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. No more fake traffic, no more city size