Cities: Skylines II is unexpectedly a car game—and it’s actually improved.

      Byron Hurd

      The most significant car updates and reviews, no nonsense.

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      Are you weary of career-focused racing games? Tired of exploring the same vast world while engaging in slightly varied speed challenges? Exhausted from running a completely chaotic taxi service in the latest Grand Theft Auto? Fed up with showcasing your Night City characters against the 17,000th (ray-traced!) backdrop? I have an alternative for you: city builders.

      More specifically, the Cities: Skylines series, because at their core, these games center around cars. Whether you design your city to cater to them, enhance their functionality, or completely exclude them, vehicles are a fundamental aspect of urban development, and that functionality is mirrored in the games that simulate it. Surprisingly, overseeing such elements can be quite engaging—even enjoyable. This is particularly true now that Cities: Skylines II has progressed enough after two years that I feel comfortable recommending it to casual players. If you’re unfamiliar with the game (or its tumultuous development journey), let me fill you in.

      Though Cities: Skylines drew inspiration from the company's earlier city sims (Cities XL, Cities in Motion, etc.), it was effectively a spiritual successor to another troubled city builder: SimCity (2013). The latest (and seemingly final) installation in the SimCity franchise emerged during the height of Top Gear’s ambition—great in concept, but flawed in execution. It attempted two groundbreaking features for a city builder. One of these was multiplayer. The constant online requirement (a major gripe for fans who simply wanted to develop their cities in peace) was rationalized by its multi-mayor regions where players could collaborate on large infrastructure projects, such as international airports.

      Bike lanes can be integrated into city greenbelts.

      It was a clever concept but ultimately hindered by the game's laughably small scale, a result of its other groundbreaking feature: agent-based simulation.

      Let me delve into this briefly: There are essentially two methods for creating a game like this: one approach uses simplified calculations to depict a population and directs the game to animate scenes that roughly mimic reality. The other method fully commits to constructing a 1:1 representation of a city. Every person, every vehicle, every drop of water—even every pet, as seen in more recent adaptations. This is known as agent-based simulation. Anything that moves within the city is represented by an agent, and the game must constantly monitor each agent.

      The detailed approach is appealing. Observing citizens go about their daily lives infuses the city with a vibrancy that previous games lacked. However, it is demanding on your PC's computational power. The developers of SimCity quickly recognized that the hardware of 2013 was unprepared to accommodate the scale of an actual city, leading to incredibly small maps (less than one square mile) that remained restricted to maintain performance, effectively transforming the game into a highly demanding diorama creator. The game lingered long enough to deliver its promised downloadable content before being entirely abandoned.

      New port additions and concrete roads enhance visual variety (left). Ferry service was introduced with the Bridges & Ports expansion (right).

      When Cities: Skylines debuted two years later, it revolutionized the genre. Not only did it effectively replicate SimCity’s agent-based model, but it did so without the many constraints—and without the mandatory online functionality. The maps were significantly larger, and performance was much more accommodating. It even adopted SimCity’s whimsical tone (minus the llama obsession), but if you weren't a fan of the default architectural styles or color schemes, the game’s endless library of user-created mods (a feature that was inaccessible due to SC2013’s always-online policy) allowed for considerable customization of the aesthetics (and much of the game's core mechanics).

      While there remains a robust modding community for SimCity 4 (the predecessor to the 2013 iteration), the majority of city builders flocked to Cities: Skylines. As its popularity soared, and fans eagerly consumed regular paid content updates, a sequel became inevitable. It promised even fewer limitations, larger maps, a more intricate simulation, and a revamped (Unity) engine to elevate everything for the bustling community of city-building content creators.

      Drawbridges were introduced in the recent (and significantly delayed) Bridges & Ports expansion. They are available for rail, road, subway, and pedestrian pathways, but not bicycles.

      It finally arrived in 2023. However, let me tell you, friends, it was a disaster. The performance was terrible, the simulation itself was incomplete, and the graphics were so poorly optimized that high-end systems produced slide shows if players wanted their cities to look any better than the previous edition. The game mechanics were patched together with enough safety nets that it was feasible to struggle your way to a sizable city that would ultimately collapse under its own weight, often without warning. Moreover, you would only discover this after