Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Sep 28, 2021

  Pretty fun game but missing a lot of important elements. Roads have no shape tools, road connections are clunky and you will sometimes have to fix a lot of roads in your city when upgrading or connecting avenues. Fire stations are practically useless in this phase of the game, my whole 300k pop city burned down with fire stations on max personnel and upgrades every few blocks and the "Safety" tab showing the whole city as covered. Driving AI needs a lot of work done too. There are no districts/zones, so you can't make special districts with stuff like "Highrise bans" or similar options we had in Cities: Skylines. Land value seems to be a bit.. weird. I was really disappointed by the fact your "outside" connections don't actually connect your cities and there is no interaction between your cities. They're just zones on the map right next to each other but I guess it looks pretty in the nation view? No functionality to share resources in your state, only money, which is also kinda weird. What if I don't want a nuclear power plant in every city that I own? What if I want just one city that uses 20% of power production and have the rest distributed to the nation? This game still needs a lot of features added. I really like the governing functions this game offers though. In my opinion do not buy this game until more features are added. The price tag of 24.99 EUR is also a bit high considering there is a lot of features that need to be added and polished. Buy it if it's on a sale, but for now until they add more stuff my opinion is do not purchase. Edit: More bugs - Citizens do not use public transport at all even if it's right in front of their house (bus and rail) - Highway connections over roads will break the roads they're being placed above - Placing a road under a highway that's already built will "chop up" the highway at the place where you placed a road under it - Planes fall out of the sky randomly (this only happened to me in my latest playthrough for a few moments) - Cars will not use highways created to connect other parts of the city but will always use roads and avenues - Game will now crash while loading in after staying in the menu for more than a few minutes before choosing a city (yay) 29th. sep. 21 - Traffic still generates so much pollution that your cities will start falling apart when your population gets higher [ https://i.imgur.com/BUEUtRb.jpeg ] you can see buildings with green/overgrown roofs are abandoned and they will soon start burning up and fire stations won't do anything about it More things I've noticed while playing: - In 1.0.4 more upgrade options were added to some building which helps out with their capacity - AI will destroy the city by themselves by starting to drive in random directions and sometimes driving in circles for a few REAL TIME minutes, this generates an insane amount of polution on those streets and it brings the land value down CRIMINALLY Dev responed on 29th of september, I'm putting my reply here in case it somehow gets burried (?) "@Citystate_Andy Not sure if you're going to read this one but thank you for taking the time to respond to the review. Appreciate the detailed answer you gave and your willingness to work on your project. I'm yet to see how the power and water is shared, I made a save just for this purpose to test it out and it never got shared between cities. :( I have a "test street" where it's filled up with bus stations and rail stations. Every single house commutes to work by car, no public transport usage what so ever. Thank you for your time dev, I will continue to update on the review!"
• gamedeal user

  Sep 30, 2021

  This feels more like SimCity4 done right than Skylines in a lot of ways. 1. You have a big region map; when you buy another square, it does not add it to your city; it will be its own city, that can be connected to other cities. 2. Skylines feels like 80% of the game past the early game is traffic management. This game has stability, dollar value, and the balance of birth rates/immigration is tricky. I will also say this game has had some good updates, is made by a responsible, responsive developer who is doing right. I suggest it.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 15, 2021

  I like this game a lot, but unfortunately you can't save your progress until you go to options and disable toutorial. Also the game crashes fairly often later on, because of that, a LOT of progress can disappear and the game doesn't auto save. But that does not mean that the game is bad, but it could be so much better if the bugs would be fixed.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 26, 2021

  In total, this game is everything we wanted from sim city 2013 but never got. If they added multiplayer and the same city building finesse of cities skylines it would probably be the best city builder ever made. The politics/civics factor is a HUGE innovation that cities skylines and sim city totally wiffed on. There are obviously more things I’d like to see added but as a base game with more updates (and mods) to come, this one comes out as one of my all time favorites. I cannot recommend this game enough. Bravo.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 3, 2021

  I really wanted this game to be good. I was hoping for a good city builder and/or a good nation simulation game. But this game does neither of the things at a satisfactory level. You can't build a natural looking city because of how it looks, and also cannot play a good state simulation like Tropico or Paradox grand strategy games. All you do is build whatever the RCI demand shows up and try to have a positive income, and connection between 2 cities might not even work for the most part. After playing for 6 hours, I feel like I've just wasted my time without even getting the fun or the satisfaction.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 5, 2021

  I dunno... It has all the element of social/nation sim (similar to democracy franchise) mix in with grid-based city builder genre (aesthetically similar to blockly terrain minecraft game with a photorealistic and props building on top). Yet, I don't feel very satisfy to play after a few hours in. The social/nation simulator bit isn't as compelling to play after you tweak the meter and scroll bars for a few hours just to see what could happened except what you get most of the time is visually null and barely feels the difference. While i don't expect this indie game to have a city builder experence like Cities:Skyline, the grid-based citybuilder gameplay is really clunky and not very fun to play (unlike my all time fav simcity4). This game will get repetitive quick after you finish one city. The longevity of the game depends on how you want to tryout your today American-centric politics (YES very much American politics) you wish to enforce in your own imaginary"nation" To me, the lack of visual impact and result of your action is will be quite unnoticeable as the city itself will be quite static through and through. A constant Left/RIght protester popping up just seemingly do nothing except to annoy my game. It's boring... I want to like this as an indie little game but this game isn't for me... It is like having a multiple of good idea and trying to cram down within one game, resulting in a mushy of a game. It's does it's own thing well enough to be it's own game but not compelling enough to make me feel justify of my spending.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 27, 2022

  I'm really glad that this game exists. It takes a brave stab at some topics that city builders should have been looking at years ago and I hope that this game is an omen for where city builders are heading. Being first to the party comes with drawbacks though and Citystate II has clearly bitten off more than it can chew. The game feels like it should still be in early access for another year or two (March 2022). In trying to be both a society simulator and a city builder the game ends up doing neither particularly well. As a city builder it falls way short on what we should expect from the genre in 2022. Placing roads are incredibly finicky and simple junctions and connections are simply not possible. Even if you build a liberal utopia there remains an absolutist ban on any curved or even diagonal roads. Not since simcity 3000 has city building been this restrictive. But even here Citystate II takes things a step further with only 2 sizes of zoned lots allowed making this feel like one of the most restrictive city builders i've ever played. The joke is that all these restrictions make all your cities look very monotonous and generic, for a game that 'allows you to build everything from a workers paradise to a capitalist nightmare that's a massive problem. The game also gives you very little information, not a single sim used the extensive railway system I built or the freeways I set up but all instead clogged my sideroads without giving me any indication of how I can fix these problems/bugs? Lastly on the city building front there is just very little to do. There are very few service buildings etc to build and core things like harbours are just missing. On the society simulator side, what society you end up making has very little impact on the look and feel of your city, something that for all its faults a game like Simcity Societies did very well showing us that it is possible to tie these themes together. I demolished some homes to widen a road after which my 'stability' indicator got stuck at 0. The only effect of having a city at literally 0 stability for years was that I couldn't pass new laws...Laws which felt like they made no real difference to how my city ran anyway. It felt like the game gave me cool law buttons and stability values that I quickly realised I never have to look at. This game feels like a reddit wishlist for what city builders should be thinking about and I think the kind of things the game tries to include is spot on. It's just a shame that it forgot to also include and integrate all the basics that make city builders so much fun in the first place. Thank you for trying Citystate II. I hope the next game that tries to do even some what you tried can learn from your mistakes and get it right. I look forward to playing that game.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 9, 2022

  My biggest complaint is that the lack of feedback. There's not really any clear indications of how the choices I am making actually affect anything. I get stuck at low stability and an inability to pass laws. Meanwhile my city grows and it gets worse. I have constant protest but no way to do anything about them because I can't pass any laws. I bet there are things I could do if I knew it, but after 6 hours I feel like all I am doing is laying out roads and zoning things in a game where that's not the point.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 18, 2022

  In real life, I'll stare at a pasta box with a -20% sale on it for 15 solid minutes trying to figure out how much it'll cost me. In this game, I feel like a PhD in macro-economics when I consider the land value, the inflation, the circulation of goods, the amount of people becoming middle class, and the exact economic growth in the services sector in my city to perfectly judge the required size of my new business district that'll answer to a demand of offices five months from now. PS : Does anyone knows if "Achieved a positive budget balance in CityState II" is enough credentials to apply to the Harvard school of economics? Asking for a friend.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 25, 2022

  This is a bad ass game about building lots of cities all connected (the only other ones like this one, that i know about, are sim city 4 and theo-town) any more like this please tell me lol. but its cool because you can also set tons of laws and even create custom laws if u play city skylines, tropico, sim city 4, or just like building cities this is a must have game. as well as city state. (the original) might as well get them both, these are in my top 10 games i like