Recent reviews by Teflo

Still pretty disappointing, even after Economy 2.0, you'd think that after nearly a year they'd start to fix more things but we're still not there yet. The game needs practically a supercomputer to run properly, even with a completely empty city a 2080 Ti system was chugging heavily. My 4090, 7950X3D system thankfully didn't have that but I started to run into performance issues once getting past around the 60-80K population mark.

There's also still quite a few bugs and graphical glitches. Despite having a full overhaul of the economy and demand systems, there were times where I just had zero demand for anything for long periods of time. This was despite the demand breakdown showed nothing but pluses for everything. Even a 0% tax rate wasn't enough to coerce residents in. This just freezes the gameplay and feels like an artificial limitation on expansion.

The economy still seems to behave in very weird ways, I had a bunch of extremely high land value that was directly opposite a huge freeway, you'd think that things like that would naturally reduce land value but that doesn't even seem to be a factor in this. Not even huge high-voltage power lines directly above homes seems to have a dent on land value. I'm not even sure how land value is being calculated in the first place, especially when one home has $500 of land value and a few homes away it's $200.

The road tools seemed like a huge improvement and whilst they definitely are, if you aren't careful with them you can make small mistakes like a road being very slightly off. The difference between perfectly straight and slightly off is very minimal, making it very easy to make slightly off roads. Being able to place things like roundabouts was a huge improvement and I found myself actually wanting to use them, so that was a huge plus.

I had a tornado that randomly snuck on me and it just looked sad, I know it's not DLC like it was in CS:1 but it looked incredibly low quality and even in the middle of the night, was fully illuminated. It looked more like a cartoon. It just played around in the ocean for a while and then just suddenly vanished. Disasters were a very fun component of the previous game and whilst it's nice to see them not charging for them, they are very disappointing. I remember fond times and the "oh ♥♥♥♥" moments of the previous game where you'd suddenly have a huge, realistic tornado destroying everything in its path, cars lifted into the sky thrown around like toys thrown across the landscape. They were terrifying and truly added to the experience. Now? They're as basic as they can be. My friend and I laughed when we first saw them, that feeling of fear and genuine panic? All gone.

Other than the tornado, the graphics have had a huge improvement, cities feel much more true to life and realistic now, the cartoony default cars of CS:1 are thankfully gone. The scale is also massively improved, with the exception of a few buildings, everything feels to have a much more appropriate scale and this is immediately noticeable.

I can't say that the population feels balanced, even in a city of 20K, you can have huge sprawling suburbs and a city centre with New York style apartment complexes or even skyscrapers. The scale of your population feels very imbalanced to what you're actually building, a city that has those types of buildings should be around 50-60K at least, not 20K. It's a bit ridiculous seeing what would normally be called a 'small village' by any normal population means having a full on city centre with trams and skyscrapers.

The game still has way too much of a focus on roads and cars. Whilst roads and cars have their place, modern cities are actively moving towards public transportation options. Thankfully, we have access to trams in the base game now, rather than DLC. However, the control that you get over your public transportation system is minimal at best. The most that you can do is set the route, set the number of vehicles on that route and then say if it's on during the day, night or both. That's it.

Considering that this has come from developers that have made much more advanced public transportation focused games in the past with an enormous array of management of them, this is grossly disappointing. The fact that you can't even set the number of vehicles for your routes at specific times, even just day and night, is completely asinine. Why on earth would I want to have a neighbourhood bus system run at the same frequency at 2am as it does at 6am. I can't say that my services has a schedule of peak, mid-peak or off-peak, just day and night with the exact same frequency.

There is also nowhere near enough data to properly design your transportation system, the only decent metric you get is the number of passengers that you get per month, so you can see that it's working somewhat. There's no charts that show usage throughout the day so you know what your peak times and off-peak times are for your city, there's no information on passenger satisfaction with your lines, there isn't even a breakdown on the wait times at different stops so you can identify bottlenecks or areas of high passenger loads. The public transport just feels like it exists and that it doesn't have a dynamic impact on your city. At least now they actually use the public transport system, unlike when the game first launched and it barely made a dent.

On top of the poor optimisation, very limited mods at the moment, the developers seemingly being ready to pause major patches and start work on DLC. The fact that I can have some nice road tools, roundabouts and fancy graphics doesn't make CS:2 worthwhile in the slightest. Considering how excellent the first game was and how highly anticipated the sequel was, it's sad to see the trend in gaming continuing of release first, fix later. We need to stop supporting these ridiculous practices and start demanding games that actually work when they're released.

For the time being, I'd recommend people who want to play a proper city builder to play CS:1, if you're someone who just wants eye candy and enjoys building cities for fun every so often, CS:2 may be worth a go, but I would absolutely not pay the ridiculous amount they're charging right now, wait for at least 50% off or try it on Game Pass.

Has a really good (and addicting) core gameplay loop that keeps me coming back for more.

If you want a fun place to hang out with friends and play some games. Look no further.

Amazingly good fun, really well designed maps and so, so many ways to kill.

Hilariously fun.
I spent around an hour in the hotel room itself and had more enjoyment than a AAA game raiding the minibar and watching TV and having a bath with the radio.
Absolutely awesome fun.

Pretty much removed the old Just Cause formula of being able to liberate bases killed me, theres literally nothing to do in settlements anymore, liberating bases are gone instead you have to do ♥♥♥♥♥♥ repetitive missions.

TL:DR wait for them to patch some ♥♥♥♥ or do not buy.

What used to be a fantastic game is slowly geing unravelled by Take 2.
The new EULA essentially makes this spyware.

The greatest murder simulator on the planet!

Lets kill the largest modding community in the world!
That sounds like it will go well.

It didnt.
Keep going everyone lets make overall Overwhemingly Negative!