Cities: Skylines II is starting to add more varied architecture
It’s been over a year since the release of Cities: Skylines II and the user reviews are still mixed. By making the game free to play until December 9, the game’s publisher will be hoping the troubled title can turn a corner.
As I wrote recently, Cities: Skylines II has improved significantly since it was first released in September 2023. The arrival of mods, improved graphical performance and the recent release of three European region packs (all free) have given the game fresh impetus.
Publisher Paradox Interactive will be hoping that a weekend of free Cities: Skylines II gameplay on Steam might tempt more of the original game’s fans to give the sequel a go and see how much it’s improved. But there’s still a lot of work to do to win over some players.
Cities: Skylines II Player Reviews
Despite the recent improvements to the game, Cities: Skylines II is still struggling to convince the paying punters. The game’s recent review rating on Steam remains “mixed”, with 53% of the 1,158 recent reviewers giving it a positive score, at the time of writing.
What are recent players unhappy about? Bugs and crashes are still a common complaint. “I played for about four hours, carefully building my city and manually saving my progress multiple times to ensure nothing would be lost,” writes one Steam reviewer from the end of November. “Yet, during my final save, the game crashed.”
“When I reopened it today, all my save files were completely gone,” the player added. “Everything I worked on vanished as if I had never played at all.”
I’ve not witnessed saved games disappearing, but bugs and crashes are still too common. In my save, attempting to place industrial buildings such as oil refineries is a common crash trigger, and I’ve set the autosave to every five minutes to ensure not much progress is lost if the game does suddenly wipe out.
Another recent complaint is a flaw in the recently introduced mods system which initially allowed malware to spread. A breach in the game’s Traffic mod included a malicious file that targeted cryptocurrency wallets on the player’s computer. That’s now been fixed, but it hasn’t gone down well with the community.
One Steam reviewer claimed that flaw “led to my first-ever malware after 28 years of PC gaming, all because CS2 lacks basic protections like two-factor authentication for mod uploads.”
However, many other reviewers are more positive about the game. There are “still some performance and tool limitations that can be frustrating at times, but overall it works well enough to enjoy and get many, many hours of entertainment out of,” wrote on recent reviewer.
Another wrote that “Cities: Skylines 2 is a solid, if imperfect, evolution of its beloved predecessor. “
Cities: Skylines II Region Packs
A free U.K. region pack was added recently
The recent addition of French, German and U.K. region packs have delivered some much-needed graphical variety to the houses, offices and other buildings that you can place on the map. Each of those packs contains hundreds of new items and they certainly help to make different regions of your city look distinct from one another.
Indeed, the improved graphical detail is probably the biggest advantage Cities: Skylines II has over its predecessor. It’s possible to create stunning-looking cityscapes… if your computer has the graphics power to cope with the game in the first place. It runs smoothly on Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, but big cities can lead to stutter and patchy frame rates on even powerful gaming PCs.
Still, with the game free to play this weekend, those who’ve wondered whether their hardware might be up to it will finally have a chance to put it to the test with zero financial risk. It could be a make-or-break few days for Cities: Skylines II.
