DO NOT BUY Cities： Skylines II - VERY disappointing!

Hello, welcome back to a new video. So

recently I've been playing the brand new

Cities: Skylines 2, and as an avid fan of

city builder games in general, I knew I

just had to play this game.

Unfortunately, so far it's been kind of

disappointing, bland, boring, and

uninspiring. It doesn't really bring much

new to the table when it comes to city

building kind of games, and I found this

game to be not very complex or challenging

for someone who's played a lot of city

building games, but also at the same time

very fiddly and annoying to try and play.

So if you've ever played a city-building

game before, you know exactly what to

expect. You lay down roads, you lay down

power lines, water pipes, sewage pipes,

and then you build houses and commercial

areas and industrial areas, and you try

and run the city without it going bankrupt

whilst managing things like the economy

and taxation and the overall happiness of

your citizens. The actual building of the

city is extremely basic and not very

challenging. Basically, all you need to do

is put down some roads, connect it all up

to the water, the sewage, and electricity,

and then place some either residential

areas commercial industrial areas, and

also the key important buildings such as

police stations, fire stations,

hospitals, that kind of stuff. Every time

you start a new city, you'll be doing the

exact same routine of putting down the key

infrastructure first, and you'll know

exactly what to do if you've made a few

cities. But then the planning of the city

is not really that fun in itself. Number

one, it's extremely fiddly trying to get

these pipes and water lines and

electricity lines to actually line up and

connect to what you're trying to connect

it to. For some reason, I had them

connected to the things they had to be

connected connected to, but the houses in

the area still were saying they were not

connected to the water pipes or the power

lines, even though they were clearly

connected from what I could see. And I

found it really frustrating placing down

these structures and trying to get the

pipes connected to them, then the roads

connected to them, then the power

connected to them, and it would still have

error messages saying that things are not

properly connected. I don't really know

what's going wrong here, but I find this

part of the gameplay to be extremely

cumbersome and frustrating. What ends up

happening is you have a sprawling mess of

cables and pipes going all over the place

because they just won't connect to what

you're trying to connect them to. Then you

end up with like a massive maze, rat's

nest network of piping and wiring. So once

you've got everything hooked up and ready

to go, then you need to start painting

areas of either residential, commercial,

or industrial. So you need commercial to

be making money so your people have jobs

to go to, and then you need residential

areas so your people have places to live

and you increase the population of your

city. And then industrial places also give

your people places to work and also

provide functions and services for the

city. You always seem to end up with the

same kind of layout, just like grids,

because that's the most efficient way to

build a city, which is why most cities in

the world have the grid format, because it

is basically the best way to build a city.

But then you end up just doing the same

thing over and over again where you just

make like a grid of roads and then you

just paint in blocks of buildings and

commercial areas depending on what you

need. It makes the game kind of

repetitive. And tedious, and you don't

really feel like you're actually building

like something unique or special.

Honestly, to me, the game just feels kind

of pointless because you're just going

through all of the buildings that you have

available and then just eventually

building all of them. Because you need a

hospital, you need a police station, you

need a fire station, you need waste

disposal and energy plants, you need

everything. So you just go through

everything and put it all down eventually.

It just kind of makes me feel like, what

is the point of doing this? I guess it's

so you kind of optimize your city so the

roads don't get jammed up and the people

are happy and you're making money and not

losing money and you've got enough

electricity and water and everything's

supplied well and everything. I guess if

you enjoy that kind of gameplay, then

you're going to like this. But Jesus

Christ, you must be a really boring person

to find that enjoyable. I can imagine the

people who genuinely enjoy games like this

would be the kind of people who would

build like a little model train set and

then just watch the train go round and

round and round for hours and that

entertains them somehow. Anyway, the

game's optimization is pretty rubbish.

I'm running a computer with an RTX 3060

with a 10th generation Core i7. CPU, and

this game doesn't run well. I was getting

like 20 FPS on medium settings. I should

have been able to play on high settings,

but then only got about 10 to 15 FPS. It

really runs the best on low settings, but

then the game just looks utter garbage. I

have a second gaming device, the ROG Ally.

I know it's not a very high-end device,

but I tried playing it on the ROG Ally as

well, and it was also even worse and

really rubbish. I could get like 10 to 15

FPS on medium settings. I had to put the

settings down to ultra low to be able to

get a decent playable frame rate. I found

it really hard to enjoy playing the game

when it looks so rubbish. I can't play

this game on high settings, the FPS just

tanks. I don't know why this game is so

demanding. I mean, it's just like a map

with some buildings. I guess it's because

there's so much going on, like each

individual person in the city, you can

click on them, they've got a name, they do

stuff like they walk up and down, they do

yoga in the garden, they go to their jobs,

they drive around. So I guess it is quite

intensive, resource-intensive. Based on

how many little micro things happening all

at the same time, like all of the

electricity and the water and all of the

economics, like the money that's going in

and going out. I guess that makes it very

CPU and GPU intensive, and maybe that's

why my laptop is not able to handle this.

But really, it should be able to handle a

game like this. It's not very graphically

impressive, it's just a city at the end of

the day. So I didn't really feel like

there's a lot of creative freedom when

building my city. The only creative

freedom you really have is placing the

roads, so you won't have like a long

street strip of a city, you could do that.

Or you want to have like a grid of a city—

that looks very boring. You want loads of

bridges going over rivers and connecting

to different parts of the city, I guess

you could do that as well. And that's

basically all you get to do is like place

the roads and then place all the buildings

and stuff around the roads, and then place

power lines and place the power generating

facilities and that kind of stuff. But

after you've done that, I don't really see

what else you can do. Like, you fill out

all the map with buildings and roads, and

then you've got to make sure it's all

functioning well and make sure the roads

are efficient and you don't get traffic

jams. And then you try and like make

money, I guess. But apart from that,

don't really see what the point of this

game is. Just like zoom in, I guess. You

can zoom in and stalk your little citizens

and follow them and keep track of them and

see what they're up to. I can't believe

this game is £50 on Steam. Can you imagine

paying £50 for this when you can get it

for free on Xbox Gaming Pass for only £12

a month? You get all the new games— well,

not all the them. Depends if it comes out

on Xbox Game Pass or not, but most of

them, or a lot of them, do come out on

Xbox Game Pass and you can play them for

free. It's just the regular monthly

subscription. I don't know why you'd buy

games on Steam anymore. So I guess I could

continue playing this game if I felt like

I wanted to watch paint dry. But

unfortunately, I'm gonna have to give this

game a score of 6.2 out of 10. It's very

mediocre, rubbish, bland, and boring. I

played SimCity ages ago, probably like 10

years ago, and And I swear this game does

nothing new. It's got slightly better

graphics, but I don't really get to enjoy

them because the whole game is so poorly

optimized for any of my gaming systems.

So yeah, I'd recommend that you do not buy

this game. It is rubbish.