Game Reviews

Many players come to Cities: Skylines to build beautiful, realistic, believable cities. Yet some of the systems that most directly limit that experience remain largely untouched. Zoning is the clearest example: the rigid grid affects building placement, curved roads, block shapes, realistic suburbs, European style streets, gaps between buildings, irregular parcels, and overall visual quality. A serious zoning and parcel-generation overhaul could transform the game. Instead, the official answer is essentially that smaller grids are not planned and better grid control is not even a short term priority.

The same pattern appears elsewhere: no major plans for integrated public transport infrastructure, tunnel and underground improvements, regional hierarchies with towns and villages, pathfinding rework, natural-disaster and evacuation improvements, flexible road building tools in normal gameplay, construction animations, or more convincing citizen activity.

What is being discussed is mostly incremental balancing, bug fixing, performance work, audio, lighting, textures, asset packs, and smaller simulation adjustments. Those are welcome, but they are polish. They do not address the fundamental limitations that stop Cities: Skylines II from becoming the city builder it could have been.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the modding community has already demonstrated demand for much deeper control over roads, zoning, traffic, detailing, surfaces, and placement. Mods are doing transformative work while the official roadmap appears focused on improving the existing framework rather than meaningfully expanding what players can build.

There is also a communication problem. The official Steam Q&A directs players to the Paradox Forums, which requires a separate Paradox account, while discussion under the Steam announcement itself is locked. For a company asking players to trust the long-term development of a troubled game, restricting discussion on the platform where many customers actually bought the game is a terrible approach. If you publish a Q&A on Steam, players should be able to discuss the answers on Steam.

I do not expect every community request to be implemented. I also understand that rewriting core systems is expensive and technically difficult. But after this much time, I expected to see a much more ambitious vision for transforming the game: better zoning and parcel generation, greater road-building freedom, better terrain and building interaction, deeper traffic-management tools, more realistic city layouts, and systems that genuinely expand the possibilities of city building.

Instead, the message currently feels like: fix bugs, improve performance, polish visuals and audio, rely heavily on mods for advanced functionality, and keep releasing content around the same fundamental systems. Maybe the upcoming roadmap will prove this assessment wrong. I hope it does. But based on what Paradox and Iceflake are communicating today, I would strongly recommend that potential buyers look carefully at the current state of the game and the developers' stated plans before spending money on Cities: Skylines II or its additional content. Do not buy it based on what you hope the game might become. Judge it based on what exists now and what the developers are actually committing to change.