izigame.me

Tough One
Long time CS1 fan but CS2 leaves me feeling both impressed at how much the engine has come on and disappointed at how much has been lost.
Firstly kudos to CO for at least warning us that the game was un-optimised, but, looking around at recent history should have told CO that this was an opportunity (However annoyed it may have left fans) for them to delay this release by a few months more to get it into a fit state.
After 15 hours of playtime on the sequel I feel confident enough (With a city of 110k) to review the game fairly.
So firstly the pro's
+ Game engine is much improved, buildings look better, animations are much better (For the most part)
+ The sims feel much more alive, you see them travelling and periods such as rush hour are now accurately reflected as opposed to CS1 where roads would grind to a halt anytime of day, which leads on to...
+ The road layout tool is vastly improved, at first it may look like its a simplified version of what we had in CS1 but there are powerful tools underneath the initial views that allow you to control many more aspects of the road layout, the AI also uses roads in a much more common sense way. changing lanes and trying to avoid jams
+ European and North American options for the most part (Apart from low density habs) look sufficiently different, although things like trains and some lorries are not localised with big old american trains for cargo spoiling some of the immersion
+ Development points is a win, replacing the standard unlocks as you grow your city you can now select particular buildings or service in the order you want to, it makes for different playthroughs and options each time and gives you more control over areas to focus on in city development, a major improvement over CS1
+ Slightly stolen from the last Simcity but the ability to upgrade existing service buildings is a welcome addition, rather than having to plop 10 different small police stations across your city you can now typically get away with one or two and simply upgrade them with larger garages or improved services. The majority of the time its cheaper than buying a new building and increases the coverage area, which reminds me
+ The service coverage area for most service buildings is far more generous now, gone are the days of having to plan to build 3 elementary schools all within the same area of your city because of their laughable service coverage zone. Service buildings now cover significant parts of the map. I did the earlier to mid-game with the very first police and fire stations you unlocked until I got to a pop of around 25k, impossible in CS1 without the city resembling a Friday night out in Essex
Now the negatives
- Its day 2 of release so mods will come but right now the game feels sparse, minimal buildings and options for many of the different types of service such as schools and police means once you've unlocked one or two lines of each services development section you've pretty much seen it all, I'm really hoping those of us who invested heavily in DLC for CS1 aren't going to be stung by countless additional DLC that simply should be in the base game to start with. Its pretty weak currently and once you've unlocked most things there isn't a great deal to do beyond continuing to grow your city with the same buildings
- The game should have released with the creation kit and mods good to go. If they can bung free copies to 'influencers' to try and butter us all up over the last few weeks they could have done the same for the actual valuable members of the CS community aka the modders. It would have left the launch feeling much less sparse. On the subject of modding, i'm not precious about steam workshop or their own version of it, I would have just liked to have seen mods here at the start to make up for the lack of content
- Pathing whilst vastly improved is still an issue later in city growth. get above 80k pop in a decent size city and regardless of improving your roads, the AI seems to have a fit and forget all of the smart stuff its been doing up to this point and rely on the same core roads and pathing as opposed to the countless other options I tried to put in place for them to use. Which reminds me...
- Public transport feels generally broken at the minute. In a city of 110k I have 1% using buses (Despite very generous spreading of stops across my city, 0% using trams, 1% using the subway and 0% using my passenger trains. Seems pretty pointless, very expensive and totally contributes to the snarling up of the road network. Definitely contributes to the end game making you feel like you are just constantly firefighting the road network than actually city planning and needs to be patched urgently
- The UI is pretty awful, everything from setting bus lines to the size of menu screens and the lack of customisation around being able to move with the mouse all feels weak at the moment and less than what we had in CS1. Its frustrating when you are laying out a transport line and suddenly a menu pops on screen and deletes all of the progress you've been making laying out your line.
- I'll talk about optimisation more generally below but stability wise I've had one crash (My rig details below) but most important point here, for some unknown reason autosave is switched off by default, which in a game like this where hours of work could be lost to a crash seems insane to me, make sure its the first option you switch on and to the devs I'd strongly urge you to have this switched to on by default.
Optimisation
Ok, the big one.
Firstly kudos to CO for admitting they had a problem, but that admittance should have led to them doing the right thing for their customers and delaying the release, but hey, we live in a shareholder driven world so needs must I guess.
Optimisation is extremely poor depending on your hardware choices, what this means looking at the steam hardware survey is that 99% of people will not have a game that feels next gen when they play. CO have themselves advised switching off a bunch of graphical options to get a decent framerate and whilst this isn't Call of Duty where frames = better, the standard in 2023 should be having the game run at a minimum of 60FPS for the VAST MAJORITY of users. This unfortunately won't be the case for many many people.
So, things to make your experience more stable (if less pretty)
- switch off depth of field - 10-20 FPS improvement
- switch off Vsync - same sort of frame gain as depth of field
- try flicking between borderless window and fullscreen, some are reporting frame gains of between 5-10 fps
- run it in 1080p if you have to - can give you 20fps or more
- switch off all of the volumetric options - 10-20 fps
All of the above is obviously dependent on your own hardware setup but on mine (I-9 12900k, RTX 3080 TI 12GB and 64GB DDR5 RAM i've been seeing a stable(ish) framerate of 68-85 fps with a pop of 110k running in 4k.
Your own experiences may vary and i'm not disagreeing that some folks with better hardware than me are having a worse time than I have and this simply reinforces the point that optimisation does seem to be all over the place at the minute.
In summary though, its not good enough, when people with £5k rigs are having to switch graphical options off for a game that isn't a FPS, then something is quite clearly badly wrong in how its been built and delivered to its users.
The hope of course is over the coming days and weeks the game will be patched. But that still isn't good enough for a £41 game that many folks have been pre-ordering and building up to for most of this year. Sure it would have been annoying to delay it by another month or two but it would have earned CO a significant bit of kudos and support from the community rather than the review bombing and open hostility we have now.
In summary then, its ok, but for those with weaker rigs, avoid for now and wait for patches to come. I'm pretty disappointed