In a significant departure from its precursor, Cities: Skylines II enlarges the play area to awe-inspiring proportions. With 441 tiles at your disposal, offering a vast 159 km² of space, you have an expansive canvas for your urban dreams. Furthermore, unlike its predecessor’s constraint of around 65,000 citizens, the sequel ushers in a realm without limitations. The population growth is only bound by your creative ambitions.

Unfortunately, this takes a toll on the performance of the game. The larger your city, the slower your PC will crawl with immense frame rate drops and sluggish movement of the camera. It’s pretty impressive how far the game will push boundaries with a decent PC before becoming a struggle to play. Still, all cities will hit a point where you’ll need to turn all graphic options down or simply start anew.

An array of services takes urban management to new heights. Police and fire stations can be allocated to specific districts, drastically enhancing their response times – and it doesn’t stop at essential services. Cities: Skylines II evolves on communication, welfare, and even death management, consolidating the intricate management of your sprawling metropolis.

One of the standout features is the heightened intelligence of the AI. Citizens choose their routes based on factors like distance, costs, comfort, and personal preferences, rendering the traffic system intricate and lifelike. This comes with added challenge, with minor adjustments to the road and public transport network causing complex issues with how citizens travel. The difficulty continues to rise when you incorporate the smarter AI into electricity use, employment, school travel, emergency services, water, and sewage… the list goes on. This is the most detailed city-management game available and is not for the faint-hearted.

Climates and seasons add layers of complexity and intrigue. Each map boasts unique weather cycles, with areas experiencing different conditions. From heavy rain to droughts and snowfall, you’ll contend with the ever-changing environment in your quest to nurture your city. With different deposits of resources within the earth, you’ll also have an added layer to closely manage pesky pollution and its impact on your civilisation. Without proper placement, you’ll be poisoning entire inhabited areas, crops, and waterways and turn your metropolis into a dystopia.

What sets the series apart is mod support and at the time of review and upon launch, modding is not available. However, the developers have announced the upcoming Paradox Mods platform for a universal experience. This means players playing on Steam, Xbox, or Epic can access the same mods across the board. With full confidence in the expansion of the game’s improved inherent mechanics, the player base should flock to create outstanding content to enhance the city-building fun further. I’m looking forward to creating a Cyberpunk 2077 city inhabited by dinosaurs who use Naarm’s Metro Tunnel in the near future.

The downside is you’ll not see much of these visuals as soon as your city becomes too large and the game slows down. Turning down graphic settings from high to low is the easiest way to solve performance issues and will turn a lot of the close-up details into textureless clay.

There are also a range of bugs that will cause frustration. Overlapping structures will often get in the way and not clearly explain how to resolve the issue, when building roads they’ll sometimes refuse to connect to each other like two repulsing magnets, and some moving elements like cars and people will pop in and out occasionally when zoomed in. Not game-breaking, but annoying.

The audio design is equally impressive. It mirrors that of a living, breathing metropolis. The hum of traffic, the chatter of pedestrians, the sirens of emergency services – these audio elements seamlessly blend to create an authentic, dynamic city.

News broadcasts and podcasts break up the soothing soundtrack and are a brilliant way to add variety to the soundscape of the game. Not only does it change things up, but it tells a story and alerts you to immediate issues in the city – whether that be complaints about excessive garbage or a recent car crash on a main highway. The voice acting is also on point and sounds just like a real person creating a podcast or radio show (we would know, we run one). Incorporating audio as another cue in the performance of your city is remarkably smart and engaging.