-- Updated as of March 6, 2025 --

There's a lot that I love in Cities: Skylines 2. So take my opinion from a place of genuine love and desire to see this game succeed. CS2 is fun, I enjoy the new gameplay features and the story your city can take with it, but there have been many issues and bugs and have just general development difficulties that leads this to be hard for me to recommend outside of those most devoted to the genre.

CS2 has a long cycle of leaving bugs open for long time before fixing them. The first DLC was a very lazy new zoning type that generally feels like it should be apart of the base game as CS2 has felt lacking on release; this however was rectified and given to all players for free. There was a time where homeless ran rampant in cities because of a months long bug that broke how homeless are supposed to find housing, and this was only fixed by a mod.

There is a lot of features that were skipped on moving to CS2. The appearance, the road layout views, and in general building in this game feel so much snappier that CS1. However, it still feels lacking, and the Flavor packs released through the mod store for different regions have helped spice up the game, but there is a large inconsistency in their appearance as they were developed by modders and not the developers. Additionally, these only really add zones and no additional buildings, a hope that CO had banked on with asset modding taking off, and unfortunately is lacking right now. It's great we have a dedicated mod team and a dedicated fan base, but I really hope CO steps up with the anniversary dlcs/updates.

The biggest blunder in this game that still exists today is the crashing. I started on a new computer, played for 4 hours and then lost everything because the save became corrupted. When this happens, there is no hope to recover unless you had AutoSaves turned ON. YES, autosaves are off by default, and you have to enable them manually. And this crashing and corruption issue has existed since Day 1.

Overall, even after my almost 500 hours at the time of writing, I still do not recommend this unless you are a bit die-hard for the genre. If you had 200+ hours in CS1 / SimCity / etc. The gameplay can be very smooth and rewarding, and the mods will honestly help alleviate many of your sorrows. It's too bad though that achievements are also disabled if you use mods, so if you did want to try 100%ing the game you need to suffer for it. It's great in ways that make it one of the best in the genre, it just suffers from limitations caused by its early release and development cycle.

-- Updated as of March 6, 2025 -- There's a lot that I love in Cities: Skylines 2. So take my opinion from a place of genuine love and desire to see this game succeed. CS2 is fun, I enjoy the new gameplay features and the story your city can take with it, but there have been many issues and bugs and have just general development difficulties that leads this to be hard for me to recommend outside of those most devoted to the genre. CS2 has a long cycle of leaving bugs open for long time before fixing them. The first DLC was a very lazy new zoning type that generally feels like it should be apart of the base game as CS2 has felt lacking on release; this however was rectified and given to all players for free. There was a time where homeless ran rampant in cities because of a months long bug that broke how homeless are supposed to find housing, and this was only fixed by a mod. There is a lot of features that were skipped on moving to CS2. The appearance, the road layout views, and in general building in this game feel so much snappier that CS1. However, it still feels lacking, and the Flavor packs released through the mod store for different regions have helped spice up the game, but there is a large inconsistency in their appearance as they were developed by modders and not the developers. Additionally, these only really add zones and no additional buildings, a hope that CO had banked on with asset modding taking off, and unfortunately is lacking right now. It's great we have a dedicated mod team and a dedicated fan base, but I really hope CO steps up with the anniversary dlcs/updates. The biggest blunder in this game that still exists today is the crashing. I started on a new computer, played for 4 hours and then lost everything because the save became corrupted. When this happens, there is no hope to recover unless you had AutoSaves turned ON. YES, autosaves are off by default, and you have to enable them manually. And this crashing and corruption issue has existed since Day 1. Overall, even after my almost 500 hours at the time of writing, I still do not recommend this unless you are a bit die-hard for the genre. If you had 200+ hours in CS1 / SimCity / etc. The gameplay can be very smooth and rewarding, and the mods will honestly help alleviate many of your sorrows. It's too bad though that achievements are also disabled if you use mods, so if you did want to try 100%ing the game you need to suffer for it. It's great in ways that make it one of the best in the genre, it just suffers from limitations caused by its early release and development cycle.