So, I've spent 5 hours playing road construction simulator and here's my take:

>> EDIT: BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT
>> With the hotfix patch, the performance considerably improved and it's now running on
>> 60fps with very rare stutter, as long as the camera angle is not too flat

Overall, Not great, not terrible.
The game runs, had no major issues so far. Some design choices are a little bit questionable, for example that I can design a detailed road grid, but not control which lane should be allowed to go which direction, like we can in Infraspace.
Otherwise the road snapping and autocurving is a little weird, but I can live with that, even though I wished that the prefab intersection were a little smaller.

Mainboard: Asus ROG Strix Z790-E
CPU: Intel i7-13700k x16 + Fractal Design Kelvin S24 Water Cooler
RAM: G.skill Trident Z5 DDR5 2x16gb
GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8G (Upgrade pending)

I own two 1080p screens, since 4k is more or less obsolete for most games, especially when you're upscaling and not actually playing native 4k. There, I said it, come at me

Yes, performance is lacking
No, the game is by no means unplayable
I can't tell you what my framerate is while playing, because the game doesn't tell you, but from experience it must be around 50 (amended to 60), with (rare) microstutter. Turning off Depth of Field helped greatly and effecively doubled the framerate. I turned down a few other things that, if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't need in a city builder simulation where 90% of the time I'm invested in some sort of informational overlay, grid-building roads and have neither the time nor the capacity to fawn over unnecessary eye candy. That's what photo mode is for.
After having been invested into my road works for like 15 minutes I didn't even really notice the stutters anymore and they're certainly not a valid reason for the game getting review bombed by people who don't know how to build a proper PC
That said, playing games consistently on 1080p60 is definitely a mid 2010s luxury. High end gaming has only really gotten this accessible in the recent years and it turns out that this was enough to turn us into a bunch of spoiled brats that can't stop demanding more.

Other people have commented that the framerate gets worse with larger cities/more citizens, which is exactly true to the genre. The same thing happens in Timberborn when your world reaches around 300 beavers on a beefy pc like mine.
This IS indeed an optimization problem but C:S2 and Timberborn handle this issue a lot better than for example Castle Story, where the number of characters is very limited because the game becomes actually unplayable if you go over that number. THAT is bad optimization.

Edit: What I also realized, because I haven't encountered literally ANY of the gameplay bugs that other people have, is that these bugs could very well be caused by the lacking performance, or rather by the machine "dropping decimals", aka losing accuracy, because something is bottlenecking. I can't really tell, because I haven't encountered these bugs, but that's my take. Also, the game DOES actually look better than C:S1, at least according to my gf, who owns it

So, I've spent 5 hours playing road construction simulator and here's my take: >> EDIT: BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT >> With the hotfix patch, the performance considerably improved and it's now running on >> 60fps with very rare stutter, as long as the camera angle is not too flat Overall, Not great, not terrible. The game runs, had no major issues so far. Some design choices are a little bit questionable, for example that I can design a detailed road grid, but not control which lane should be allowed to go which direction, like we can in Infraspace. Otherwise the road snapping and autocurving is a little weird, but I can live with that, even though I wished that the prefab intersection were a little smaller. Mainboard: Asus ROG Strix Z790-E CPU: Intel i7-13700k x16 + Fractal Design Kelvin S24 Water Cooler RAM: G.skill Trident Z5 DDR5 2x16gb GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8G (Upgrade pending) I own two 1080p screens, since 4k is more or less obsolete for most games, especially when you're upscaling and not actually playing native 4k. [strike]There, I said it, come at me[/strike] Yes, performance is lacking No, the game is by no means unplayable I can't tell you what my framerate is while playing, because the game doesn't tell you, but from experience it must be around [strike]50[/strike] (amended to 60), with (rare) microstutter. Turning off Depth of Field helped greatly and effecively doubled the framerate. I turned down a few other things that, if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't need in a city builder simulation where 90% of the time I'm invested in some sort of informational overlay, grid-building roads and have neither the time nor the capacity to fawn over unnecessary eye candy. That's what photo mode is for. After having been invested into my road works for like 15 minutes I didn't even really notice the stutters anymore and they're certainly not a valid reason for the game getting review bombed [strike]by people who don't know how to build a proper PC[/strike] That said, playing games consistently on 1080p60 is definitely a mid 2010s luxury. High end gaming has only really gotten this accessible in the recent years [strike]and it turns out that this was enough to turn us into a bunch of spoiled brats that can't stop demanding more.[/strike] Other people have commented that the framerate gets worse with larger cities/more citizens, which is exactly true to the genre. The same thing happens in Timberborn when your world reaches around 300 beavers on a beefy pc like mine. This IS indeed an optimization problem but C:S2 and Timberborn handle this issue a lot better than for example Castle Story, where the number of characters is very limited because the game becomes actually unplayable if you go over that number. THAT is bad optimization. Edit: What I also realized, because I haven't encountered literally ANY of the gameplay bugs that other people have, is that these bugs could very well be caused by the lacking performance, or rather by the machine "dropping decimals", aka losing accuracy, because something is bottlenecking. I can't really tell, because I haven't encountered these bugs, but that's my take. Also, the game DOES actually look better than C:S1, at least according to my gf, who owns it