Attention citizens! You may have noticed two exciting new features in our fair city. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, an extremely massive and expensive scientific facility that will inspire an interest in education and boost our tech industry! The second new feature is that, due to the heavy infrastructural demands of the collider, every sewer in the city is backed up and none of your toilets will flush.
Not to worry! To fix that I’ll just buy more land so I can build additional groundwater pumping stations and water treatment plants—or at least I would do that if I hadn’t spent every last penny on that big collider thing. Time to mess with some budget sliders and take out a huge loan I’ll probably never be able to pay back, so expect higher taxes, fewer firefighters and ambulances, and please, please try not to use the bathroom for the next several years.
I’m highlighting my questionable skills as mayor because my multi-million dollar large hadron collider breaking plumbing is symbolic of Cities: Skylines II itself. Colossal Order’s new urban city builder is huge and impressive, a complex machine with tons of moving parts that improves on many of the systems and features of the original game. But like a scientist who can smash atoms but not flush their toilet, it’s let down by some small yet important details. Cities: Skylines II is much bigger than the original, but unfortunately it’s not better—at least not yet.