Cities: Skylines II - Atmospheric Piano Channel (DLC)

I've watched a lot of city-builders promise depth and deliver a glorified idle game, so when Cities: Skylines II landed with an enormous simulation overhaul and maps that dwarf anything in the original, I was ready to be cautiously impressed. The truth is more complicated than either the hype or the backlash suggests, and it depends heavily on two things: what hardware you're sitting in front of, and how patient you are with a game clearly built for where it's going rather than where it is. On the systems side, Colossal Order has genuinely pushed the genre forward. The progression system now awards experience points from placing roads, growing population, and upgrading service buildings, then lets you spend development points to unlock branches ranging from basic healthcare to a late-game space center. Each citizen runs a full daily schedule, industries draw from actual resource nodes across the map, and surplus goods can be exported to off-map regions, giving the economy real teeth rather than the abstract number-pumping of most competitors. The road toolset is dramatically more flexible than CS1's, zone drawing for farms and mining operations is genuinely tactile, and the map tiles are large enough that you can sprawl into a legitimate megalopolis across multiple sessions. The weather and terrain variety across starting maps adds meaningful asymmetry to early decisions. Here is where honesty demands a full stop: performance is the defining issue of this game's existence. At launch the GPU-bound renderer struggled even on high-end rigs, and the community uproar was loud enough that Colossal Order issued what amounted to a pre-release apology. Patches have arrived steadily, and a community poll run by the developer showed that around 38 percent of players now rate performance as good, while over 60 percent still report simulation slowdowns or frame-rate problems. Mid-range hardware gets hit hardest once populations climb past 100k-200k, and the simulation itself carries lingering bugs: industry traffic generation has broken and been un-broken across patches, the economic model has been called "almost pointless" by technical observers, and certain infrastructure bugs, like the inability to build train bridges over specific water tiles, have persisted across multiple major patches. The mod ecosystem, now routed through Paradox Mods rather than the Steam Workshop, adds another friction point for players used to the CS1 workflow. For newcomers to city-builders, the game actually holds your hand better than CS1 did at launch. The tutorial is structured, the UI surfaces relevant information without burying it, and the milestone system from small village to megalopolis gives clear short-term targets while you learn zoning ratios and power grid logic. The development points branch also means you can defer complexity you aren't ready for, putting off airport and harbor unlocks until your budget is stable. That said, the content pool is noticeably thinner than a heavily DLC'd CS1, with tourist attractions and large-scale landmarks still sparse compared to what years of community and official additions built for the predecessor. The honest verdict for a strategy-minded buyer is this: if you have a modern high-end PC and tolerance for occasional simulation quirks, there is more depth here than any other city-builder on the market right now, and the foundation for something genuinely special over the next few years. If you are on mid-range hardware or want the polished, content-rich experience CS1 offers today, the original game plus mods is still the more rational purchase in 2024. CS2 is a bet on Colossal Order's roadmap, and that bet has looked better with each patch cycle, but it remains a bet.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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