(bright tones) - [Jake] Hey, and we're
back with another episode of "Before You Buy," that
show where we give you some straight up gameplay
and our first impressions of the latest games releasing. As usual, it's me, Jake. We're in our busy season. Today, we're talking
about "Cities Skylines 2." Now, this is the follow up to the absolutely frigging
monumental "Cities Skylines," one of the best city builders
to ever do it, in my opinion. "Sim City" really stumbled and fell after EA messed up with that whole thing, and "Cities" was there to pick
up the ball and run with it. That game is awesome. I haven't mentioned it
in videos much here, but I'm a big fan of city builders, and I've casually played
a lot of the first game. I'd have bouts like every year or so where I download it again and get hooked and dump
hours and hours into it. Now, while I'm not filling
the game to the brim with mods or anything, like
getting ultra hardcore, I just love playing it. "Cities Skylines" has been
really, really well supported for years and I can't speak
to the console version, but the PC version has
had a bunch of updates, a metric ton of DLCs and
add-ons and game changers, and then the modder scene
take it even further and made the game even more
in depth and incredible. So now here just setting the
stage, "Cities Skylines 2" kind of wipes the slate clean, I guess, starting with a new, more in-depth, and presumably adaptable foundation to once again hopefully
live on in the hearts and minds of city builders
for years to come. Now, we've been playing a review copy, although we didn't get
our hands on it as early as some places, so this
is just first impressions. I've worked my way through
one big city build, and it's very clear to me
that the game achieves a lot, but it's just out way too early. I'm gonna address this upfront because it's gonna be all the comments and a lot of the
conversation around the game. I mean, look at this video on screen here. "Cities Skylines 2" does not look great. This isn't my machine,
this is, across the board, the experience for most people, you know, to varying degrees because
everybody's machine is different but "Cities Skylines 2" two
feels extremely undercooked and not optimized. I had everything at medium and low, just in the hopes of kind of
getting 30 frames per second. No matter what I did, the game looked pretty
ugly and ran poorly. I bring this up not because
I'm a frame rate counter or a pixel counter or anything tech heavy. I'm not digital foundry, but this does here severely
affect the experience. The enjoyment factor is lessened because the game just isn't
very smooth most of the time, and is harsh on the eyes. Yeah, after a while, you can get it barely acceptable running, but even then the bigger your city gets, by nature, the problem will grow. And you know, even when you zoom in, there's not a lot of of granular detail and there's a lot of
weird bugs and glitches. You'll occasionally just get a weird build where things clip through each other, sometimes the terraforming
looks a little weird, cars will just clip through each other. Sometimes I've seen a couple
of them go through buildings and go through roads. I think it's upsetting that
they put the game out this early because it didn't need to be this way. I love "Cities Skylines", but I think, and maybe most of the community as well, would've patiently waited
as long as it would've taken for the game to be released
in an acceptable state, especially with the amount
of other games out right now begging for your time that feel way more polished and finished. It's rough. Now, having said that,
the base of the game is mostly great, technical stuff aside. It's got some nice refinements,
improvements, and additions that feels like it's
trying to bring "Cities" to the next level. Like, right off the bat you can tell, you can feel "Cities Skylines 2" is big, like it just feels way more massive, like you just feel like you
have a much larger palette in front of you. There are a ton of tiles, many of which have annoying
elevation you need to tweak with the finicky terraforming
system seemingly everywhere, but you can very quickly just
start buying up tons of tiles and expanding your land
and the game encourages it. It's not unrealistic now to have suburbs really far away from a city, or maybe a bunch of farms
way out in the country, way out in like a corner
of your map, and it's cool. You can get pretty wide pretty quickly thanks to some really great
feeling building tools, like first of all,
electricity is pretty simple and you're not as bogged down in plopping power lines everywhere. It's one of the few parts of the game that actually goes more hands
off instead of more hands on, but it works. But thankfully, if you're a power nerd, you can get more granular in
the actual power management. Less about just running lines
and getting caught up in that. Now, the road system is great. It's super quick and easy
to create massive grids, long curvy roads,
complicated intersections, roundabouts, everything, all in seconds. The tools don't feel finicky. They're just as precise and as flexible as they should feel,
and they adapt easily. The game also makes it
really easy to fix your work, like make your roads bigger even or add stuff to them in a pinch. Changing a road later on
isn't much of a headache as it used to be. Like, it can still be tricky,
but little things they do just make it easier where it matters. Like, say you have an intersection and it's causing a bunch of traffic jams, so you want to add a roundabout
or a traffic circle instead to kind of free things up. The game very easily lets you just click and drop it right in, and the game will
automatically rezone or delete or you know, bulldoze
certain things around it. But to see the game, like
the roads, the sidewalks, everything adapt to that roundabout, and the game also not
completely destroy everything around it as you plop it down, it just feels thoughtfully integrated and just really well done. Smaller things, the game has seasons, which is pretty nice to see in action. I like it way more than
the day night cycle, which you can turn off. It seems way too dark in
this game in particular. I had a hard time playing and building and doing things at night, but speaking of seasons, while the little visual changes are nice, the game does seem to lack a
bit of the granular fun stuff it used to have in terms of detail. Like, you don't really
see people doing as much, fires and stuff like that. You used to have fire trucks pull up and all this stuff going on. Now, a truck will just pull up to a fire, like one firetruck and
then it'll just sit there for a bit and then eventually
the fire disappears. Like, that stuff seemingly
is not there yet. There's also not really
any decorative props I could find other than vegetation. Well, while the game has a lot of transit and other civic options like
mailbox drops and bus stops, you don't have a lot of control over the more superfluous
details on the streets, the fun decorative stuff
that doesn't matter, but I still think some
people will want that. Where the detail is in is
with the district tool. Now you can create designated areas that only get certain types of service, and you can enact certain
policies just for these sections. It's for efficiency, really. Basically instead of everything you do or enact that blankets the entire city, here you can just section
it up a little bit. Then you can also click a created district and get at-a-glance information about just that certain area. So you can keep things a little organized. Plus, I just like when you zoom out and you can see all of
your district's named, kind of like neighborhoods on Google Maps. And speaking of these districts, you can now do specialized industries that have strategic placement, kind of like something
like "Civilization," like in a Civ game. You can plant a farm, but you're gonna wanna
plant it specifically where the land is fertile, or you're gonna want
to build a lumber mill where there's a large cluster of trees, or a quarry near a bunch
of stones on the map, stuff like that. You can actually drag and draw
lines to create farmlands, and it's fun to get creative and work around the
resources you're given, and this all ties into your economy, which has a lot you'd
expect, like, you know, managing taxes and public spending, getting loans and paying
them, all that boring stuff, but something about it all doesn't seem as super in-depth as it could be. Graphs and breakdowns, like for
public spending, are simple, and I'd like to see it broken down into more of what's going on. I understand there's a balance that the developers have to do because this stuff can get boring and it can get lost in the weeds, but some of it seems a little
vague, a little too vague, and that comes into issue
when things get complex with your bill, then problems crop up, and sometimes it's hard to identify what exactly the issue
is because of this lack of information or the way it's displayed. Now, a progression
overhaul is pretty cool. I dig it here. It's different. Maybe some hardcore
fans may not like this, but I like working towards stuff. So you don't just progress
through population increasing, you gain XP by doing
stuff and leveling up. The XP is gained through,
you know, population growth, of course, but also
increasing citizens happiness and just doing things like
building and adding good things. And as you level up, your
city goes from little thing to small town to busy town
to, eventually, a big city. And as you level up these ranks, you unlock access to doing more, and this is how the game
kind of eases you in and doesn't overwhelm you with
options right at the start. You're also earning skill
points to then spend on basically a skill
tree that unlocks stuff for each category. Like say in the transportation category, you can unlock an airport, or in the hospital, you can
then unlock specialists, or road maintenance depots
for roads and stuff, stuff like that. Now these are things that aren't essential to have unlocked right away,
but then are fairly easy to unlock at about the time
you'd probably be needing it or wanting it, at least in my experience. It could dry up for people at
certain points pacing wise, but so far I like the way it's paced. It could slow down, but along with this, extensions for buildings
are nice and easy, like click a special building and then there's an easy bit
of options to spend money and expand operations,
capacities, abilities, like a bus depot for mass transit, you have a bus depot, right? Are you running out of buses? Add some garages to the side
of the depot to get more buses. Having trouble getting some far
off citizens to the hospital in an emergency? Add a helipad or an intensive care wing or something like that to your hospital. Some of these will take up more space, like more land, but it's worth it. There's a lot of detail to
it and it's pretty satisfying because it's usually a visual change as well as a tangible, beneficial one. Now, what helped me realize just how good some of these updates and
additions and cleanups are, it's actually pretty fun now to go back and fix or update stuff. The game does a really good job
of just going with the flow, like fixing stuff on the
fly or down the line, like further on is actually fun. It's not aggravating or as tedious. There's still stuff here and there. You're always gonna fiddle
with certain things. It's a city builder, but
the flexibility of this game and just throwing stuff
at it and it keeping going and being somewhat forgiving
makes it fun to play. So the way it all goes down, because these are just first impressions, it's hard to judge how
it'll all really flow into high-level play. Like, I'm talking like
60 hours into a build, will the game collapse? Will it still feel fun? I think probably, but I don't know. I do think, however it's paced, even if there are some
issues or my issues, just with some problems
not being super clear, it doesn't matter too much right now. What matters is that I think
the game needs more time in the oven. It's got a lot of great stuff figured out, but technically wise, I
think it's still released in a pretty unacceptable state. And I hate this because, one,
the game deserves better, but also, two, hopefully a year from now, it makes this video
completely out of date. This stuff is bad but at least
the foundation seems solid. But for now, I would wait. Is it easy to recommend waiting
even if the launch was solid because you know the developers
will probably be adding DLC and modders will take control of it? Yeah, sure, but in the technical state, that's the biggest reason
for a wait right now. That being said, it seems
like it's gonna be a good game down the line, but as of right
now, it's kind of annoying. So this is a "Before You Buy," you know how this goes by
now, I give you some pros, some cons, and some personal opinion, and now I wanna hear yours
down in the comments. What are you thinking
about "Cities Skylines?" Do you love the first
game as much as I do? Did you play it casually like me or did you mod the hell out of it? Are you somewhere in between? Let's talk and let's
talk what you're thinking with this new game. Are you gonna wait? Are you patient with the updates? Is it running better on your machine? Let's talk about any of this
stuff down in the comments. If this helped you at all, though, clicking the like button helps us out. We'd appreciate that. And if you're new, consider subscribing, maybe hitting that notification bell. But either way, thanks for watching, and we'll see you guys next time.
