Is This the Game I’ve Been Waiting For?

A few weeks ago now we got the first gameplay trailer for Cities Skylines 2 and wow, this game looks amazing.

For the last few years, I’ve had this ongoing cycle of playing SimCity 2013 and loving the simulation/realism aspects but the map size always feels so limiting. Because of this, I always end up swapping to Cities Skylines.

At first I love the huge maps and freedom of Cities Skylines but it doesn’t take long for me to get bored by the lack of actual simulation (aside from traffic). In CS, I’ve had periods where I’ve got unemployment up to 35% and there were no noticeable side effects from this.

In comparison, if your unemployment rate in SC2013 gets to even half of that your approval rating will drop, Sims would be protesting outside City Hall and you’ll have transients occupying all the parks. That last point is very interesting too as when they occupy the parks, your working sims won’t go there to relax which makes them unhappy and it further drives down your approval rating.

Pretty much everything you do has a consequence in SimCity but it wasn’t always the case for CS. That seems to have changed for Cities Skylines 2.

A New Level of Detail

Although we’ve only had that one gameplay trailer along with a developers diary based around roads, we can always see CS2 will be much heavier on the simulation aspect.

Based on screenshots and leaked achievements, we can now limit city services to certain districts only. This might not sound that ground breaking but it truly is.

This allows you to pretty much create low and high wealth suburbs. You can simply limit city services from certain areas or have a abundance of them to create high wealth area. This also fixes the issue in CS1 where emergency services will travel halfway across the map to put out a fire when there is another fire station directly next to it.

Traffic A.I is now improved too with Cims being able to change lanes, have car crashes, require parking and have preferences on how much they are willing to pay for parking. You also have upgradable buildings just like in SC2013 which will make expanding on some service buildings much easier as your city grows.

There’s many more features already confirmed that I’m glossing over but the crazy part is there will be another 12 developer diaries to go which will dive into new features.

I always wanted a game that would take the best parts of both SimCity 2013 and Cities Skylines and this game appears to be that. Although it’s months away from release, this is a game I’m very excited for so be prepared to see many more posts related to this game in the coming months.