Cities: Skylines 2 Is Getting Bashed in Steam Reviews

Cities: Skylines 2 came to PC and Xbox Game Pass for PC yesterday, but it’s not having the best launch when it comes to its Steam reviews.

The simulation city-builder sequel has been out for just over 24 hours and at the time of this story’s publication, unfortunately, sits with an overall score of “Mixed” after 9000 reviews on Valve’s digital storefront. As you might have guessed, most of the criticism stems from poor optimization on PC, with many cautioning players to wait a few months until after developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive have patched some of the issues. Specifically, many are complaining about widespread framerate issues in Cities: Skylines 2, including problems that see dips into 20fps on high preset settings.

“The game performs horribly, and on the settings that allow it to scrape by with 20fps it looks dramatically worse than Cities 1,” Cities: Skylines 2 player CountCristo said. “There are also various bugs (especially around ‘not enough customers’) that fill the game with annoying bubble alerts for no reason.”

Related: Cities: Skylines II Revealed, Launches in 2023

Then, there are players like Stin, who says their high-end computer specs still yielded poor results: “Not a single other graphics setting changed the performance at all. I turned off every single setting I could or set it to the lowest possible, and still only got 50 fps. This is impressively bad optimization, I actually can’t recall another game recently where changing the graphics settings literally did nothing to fps. Just stay away from this until they fix it.”

It’s a brutal start for the highly anticipated video game, but it’s, sadly, not unexpected. Just one week before launch, Paradox and Colossal warned players that the launch build of Cities: Skylines 2 may not live up to expectations. The developers knew about the performance issues but were still pushed to release the game as is, regardless. It stings to see negative reviews already plaguing Steam, but hopefully, the team will put out fixes sooner rather than later.

“Cities: Skylines 2 is a next-gen title, and naturally, it demands certain hardware requirements,” Paradox and Colossal said at the time. “With that said, while our team has worked tirelessly to deliver the best experience possible, we have not achieved the benchmark we targeted.

“In light of this, we still think for the long-term of the project, releasing now is the best way forward. We are proud of the unique gameplay and features in Cities: Skylines 2, and we genuinely believe that it offers a great experience that you will enjoy.”

Cities: Skylines 2 launched for PC players yesterday. PlayStation 5 (PS5) and Xbox Series X | S versions are currently slated to arrive in spring 2024. There is currently no word on when performance enhancements will arrive.