In the years since its 2015 release, Cities: Skylines set a new standard for city-building simulators. The game's mundane tasks of laying out street grids, zoning neighborhoods, designing bus networks, and siting garbage dumps were made immersive and fun by a realistic, detailed game engine and by graphics that made you feel like the city you were tinkering with was a living, breathing thing.
Hopes were therefore high that the sequel, Cities: Skylines II,would build on the success of the first game. Instead, it has been universally considered a gigantic flop. Only the most souped-up gaming computers were able to handle its processing demands. Even then, the gameplay was buggy and graphics disappointing. As Ars Technica put it, the second Skylines "has a rough-draft look when compared to its predecessor, which has accumulated eight years of fixes…and mods to cover a dizzying array of ideas."
