izigame.me

I'm gonna try to be genuinely honest here. The situation for the game is pretty nuanced, and that can be difficult to express in a time when everything needs to be a meme and/or the worst/best thing to ever happen. In short: you can buy the game right now and have a heck of a lot of fun, but the game might have gotten off to a better initial reception had it been delayed for another 6 months or so.
Pros: The game is a lot of fun at this stage, and I am so happy we already get to play it whenever we want.
1. What is here now is definitely enough to call this a "full release."
2. You can do a LOT, and you have much better tools out the gate compared to the first game. It's less finicky, while also more powerful, so it's a heck of a lot easier to reach a higher baseline of cool-looking cities. Can't overstate how much of an evolution this is. Examples: road tool is insane, zoning (and the way assets are categorized) gives you much more control, as well as more types of zoning.
3. Performance issues aside, the game is an insane visual upgrade. The game can look frankly shockingly impressive. This ties into the first point to make cities better-looking by default. In the first, you'd need several mods to start making cool cities. Not here.
4. The simulation is really hecking cool. There are some bugs, but in general the way the city works with individually simulated agents makes for a city that has sort of its own life independent of your decisions - all of a sudden, you might notice a lot of people have educated themselves and consequently want different places to work and live so you now have a bunch of other options to build different stuff. Cool! So, it needs a little bit of work, but it's absolutely mostly there.
5. Since everything is simulated, traffic is a lot better. Mostly, you're fine, and at rush hour you get some backup. That's pretty much it now.

Cons: there are pretty good arguments it could have been a) delayed for like 6 months or b) released as an Early Access product.
1. Quite a lot of small bugs. Whether it's education being unbalanced, commercial having weird import/export stuff, or garbage being handled oddly, there's stuff in the simulation that isn't working as intended, or is in need of further balancing. Most of the stuff is simply down to not having played the game enough before to notice, or not having enough time to fix it. I guess it's annoying if you sit and think about it, but not a single one of the bugs have really bothered me in a meaningful way.
2. Performance is bad, but Colossal Order have been very upfront about that from before the game was released. Some of the reporting on it post-release, however, makes it seem like they just didn't have enough time to finish all the work. For instance, the reports on wild amounts of polygons being rendered, the acknowledge (more-or-less) by Colossal Order about LOD work simply not being finished, or the broken effects (you pretty much need to turn some of them off.) You can ABSOLUTELY run the game - just check out the posted performance guides on which effects to turn off.
3. Compared to a very kitted up Cities Skylines 1, with all DLC and mods, you might feel a little restricted. If you've played it a lot you'll come across situations where you go "what a great spot this would be for a custom park," or whatever feature from the first game's 10-year life cycle. If you've never played that version of the first game, you might come across situations where you're like "so I just build more of mostly the same type of district?" And...both yes and no. There is some challenge to be creative, but on the other hand that forces you to familiarize yourself with the tools at hand to get the most creativity out of what IS here. Your mileage may vary.
4. Bluntly, some things just make it seem like the game is like 3/4 finished. Why are there no unlocks past the half-way point of the development roadmap (small city-big city etc)? Room for future expansions, or planned but cut features? Who knows. Don't get me wrong, these are non-essential things, but the feeling is there after almost 70 hours in the game.
Taken as it is, you could argue they should've delayed 6 months or released into Early Access instead. But you can also argue that releasing it will ultimately make the game much better much faster by both a) making the developers accountable to the players rather than some arbitrary release date and b) giving them more feedback than they could ever need to improve the game. Is it a little cynical? Maybe. Did they coldly calculate that the short-term reputation loss would be offset by the longer-term improvements of both what the bottom line looks like for the fiscal quarter as well as the game itself? Also maybe, but don't they have a right to do that, and do we need to be maximally dramatic about it if that is what they decide to do? Looking at it coolly, it is a complicated situation for a company, and either way they would have gone there would have been pros and cons. I won't presume I'd know so perfectly well what would be the right thing to do for players, employees, publisher, and the company itself.
Furthermore, you could argue that the Early Access label brings with it certain connotations - a never-ending cycle of waiting for when the game is no longer "almost finished" and developers who just abuse the concept to avoid accountability or expectations of quality. Also, is it maybe not allowed to release something as Early Access, when it's already been marketed as a "full release" sort of thing? Heck if I know - I'm not a lawyer!
To sum it up: Issues notwithstanding, I'm super glad I'm playing the game now rather than in 6 months. I'm glad I get to play it in a state where I can expect what is there to be enough for a release, and don't have to think about what's a month or two down the line. As for the rest of it, I might feel a way about it, but ultimately I'll leave up to Colossal Order because it's their product in the end.