The road tools are a delight. Parallel roads, asymmetrical lanes, roundabouts, traffic lights, stop signs, lane connectors—you can micro-manage every intersection. Traffic AI is smarter: vehicles change lanes earlier, use slip lanes, and actually obey lane arrows. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange without downloading 17 mods.
The art style is more realistic but also flatter. Buildings have better texture detail, but the global lighting can feel washed out. Worse, forced Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) creates noticeable ghosting and softness in motion. There’s no native resolution rendering option. Mods can help, but vanilla visuals range from “pleasant” to “muddy” depending on time of day and weather. Cities Skylines II
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. The road tools are a delight
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. You can finally fix that one problematic interchange
It’s a brilliant simulation buried under technical debt. When everything works—when you watch raw ore travel by train to a smelter, then to a parts factory, then to a tool shop, then to a hardware store, and a citizen buys a hammer to upgrade their home— Cities: Skylines II is unmatched. But too often, you’re fighting performance, missing features, or unclear feedback loops.
Zoning isn’t just about “jobs vs. homes.” Industry now has depth: a timber company needs wood, which requires forestry, which needs workers and road access. You can specialize districts for petrochemicals, agriculture, or electronics. You’ll watch raw materials travel to processors, then to factories, then to commercial zones. When your highway clogs, the electronics plant slows down, then shops run low on luxury goods, then citizens complain about “missing services.” It’s an actual system, not window dressing.