Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive’s ambitious follow-up to one of the best city builders of all time, has gone free-to-play. However, this will only apply for this weekend, with the event closing in the afternoon hours of Nov. 16.
The free-to-play model has more than doubled the game’s concurrent player count, bumping it from about 8,000 to over 16,000, according to SteamDB. People seem genuinely interested in checking the game out, though its less-than-stellar reviews and horrible reputation still seem to impact players’ willingness to actually spend any money on it, despite numerous discounts.
Speaking of which, Cities: Skylines 2 is also 30 percent off, or more if you go for the bundle and already own the original.
Ever since its original creators, Colossal Order, gave the game up to Paradox Interactive and Iceflake Studios, the game has gradually improved in overall quality. Things are undoubtedly moving at a snail’s pace, with Iceflake doing as much as it possibly can to salvage the title and reclaim some of that lost trust from the players. Despite their best efforts and, of course, several DLC releases, Cities: Skylines 2 still has a “mixed” rating on Steam, meaning it cannot be featured on the store’s front page or get any of that juicy free exposure from Valve.
The recent reviews fare much better, though. With 72 percent of those being positive, Cities 2 thus holds a “mostly positive” rating in this category, but players still have a lot of bones to pick with the game’s many systems, namely traffic and simulation, whereby bugs and issues that’ve been there from the start remain in the game.
I, for one, was extremely excited to get into Cities 2 ahead of its original release in 2023. The original Cities: Skylines is one of my favorite games of all time, and certainly my favorite city builder, and its sequel promised to up the ante on so many different levels. I was chiefly enamored by how detailed the new assets were in Cities 2, how big everything was, and how that would allow me to zoom in and see the minutiae from up close, but my hype evaporated once I got my hands on it.
The jank was unbearable, and the faulty simulation meant the game lied to you all the time, feeding you false information to make it seem like simulation was happening when, in fact, it was all fake.
Iceflake has since fixed many of these issues, and I will definitely be revisiting the game in the coming days.
