It’s hard to believe, but the premiere metropolis maker this side of SimCity 4 has just hit a 10-year milestone—and in classic city builder fashion, Cities: Skylines 2 is honoring the occasion with traffic bug fixes, new buildings and radio stations, and major changes to homelessness.
Notably, citizens will no longer become adults and then immediately become homeless by moving out of their parents’ place into a crowded housing market. In fact, they won’t move out at all until they’ve found a job, and may become commuters if no housing opens up for them. To account for the added nuance, homelessness has been added to the game’s Info View, with homeless households visible like any other.
The patch also adds easy and normal modes, 10 new "birthday parks," and a host of bug fixes and smaller tweaks concerning traffic, crime, and everything in-between.
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Owners of Cities: Skylines 2's ultimate edition will also find six new DLCs in their library, including three new radio stations and three Creator Packs, which bundle in dozens of signature buildings built by community creators. The radio stations—Atmospheric Piano, Jade Road, and Feelgood Funk—bring in relaxing piano tunes, a range of styles inspired by China’s musical history, and a blast of ‘70s-style funk to your city. They seem almost like pairings for the new creator packs, which add a spread of Mediterranean buildings, traditional Chinese architecture, and "leisure venues" like a tea lounge, steakhouse, and an esports arena.
While these are all included in the $90 USD ultimate edition, it can be bought separately for just under $25 as a bundle.
It’s hard to say whether all this will finally see the game edging out its predecessor as the superior game; as PC Gamer senior editor Christopher Livingston put it in his review, the game is bigger, but not exactly better. It remains at a "Mixed" user rating on Steam with 53% of its nearly 50,000 reviews being positive. However, the changes to homelessness in particular do add some additional complexity to the simulation, and traffic fixes and new buildings don’t hurt.
If you’d rather try the first game, you may want to wait for March 20th, as it will be free-to-play as part of this birthday bash until the 24th. It’s also just launched its new DLC subscription service in case you want to dodge the gargantuan up-front price tag to play with all the extra content. Time will tell if this will come to the sequel, which has already racked up a decent smorgasbord of paid DLC; until then, Cities: Skylines 2 is on sale on Steam through March 20th.
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