Having spent more than two years in the doldrums, Cities: Skylines II is staging an astonishing fightback. A new developer, a battery of bug fixes and an influx of mods has made this once beleaguered game a sleeper hit. And with 30% off in the Steam summer sale, it might be cheap enough to tempt fans of the original who’ve resisted buying its poorly received successor.
Cities: Skylines II got off to a very poor start when it was belatedly released in October 2023. The game was beset with performance issues, to the point where even high-end gaming PCs were struggling to achieve decent frame rates and about the only way to make the game playable was to rely on super-powerful cloud gaming rigs.
The game had other issues. Mods weren’t available at the start, making the game less configurable and leaving players unable to fix obvious bugs, such as the hugely erratic traffic AI. Regular crashes and a litany of tiny glitches throughout the game made city building a chore, especially when the city grew in size and the performance issues and other glitches became more obvious.
Now, eight months after the game’s publisher, Paradox Interactive, announced it was parting ways with developers Colossal Order, Cities: Skylines II is in much better shape.
Cities: Skylines II Review Scores Boosted
One look at the Steam review scores is enough to confirm the game has turned a corner.
Until the start of this year, the game was attracting as many negative reviews as it was positive, leaving the Steam review score hovering around the 50% mark. However, the positives have increasingly outweighed the negatives throughout 2026, to the point where, at the time of writing, the game has a 74% positive score for reviews written in the past 30 days (of which there have been 951).
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
Many of the Steam reviewers have noticed the difference since new developer Iceflake Studios took over. “Before they became the devs behind the game, the game felt like a game in beta, it felt incomplete,” wrote one Steam reviewer. “Now it’s really starting to feel like a fully fleshed out base game and I could not be more happy about the progress. Overall in the last year the quality of game play has significantly gone up.”
Several have commented on improved performance since the new developers took charge, with improved frame rates and the ability to load bigger cities without the simulation grinding to a halt. “Iceflake has been making all the right noises and have backed this up with a couple of excellent patches,” wrote another Steam reviewer. “I’m watching with considerably more optimism than I had two years ago and look forward to what Iceflake might bring to the game in the future.”
Cities: Skylines II Mods
To be fair to Colossal Order, the growing number of mods for the game (which the previous developer introduced) has also made a big difference. There are mods that allow players to insert real-life landmarks in their cities, such as football stadiums; there are mods that add new gameplay elements such as elections; there are mods that allow you to take finer control of the traffic or override some of the game’s other irritations, by letting you overlap builds, for example.
The difficulty with mods is that they are often broken by game updates, and with Iceflake churning out the patches on a more regular basis, that means players are often left waiting for mod developers to catch up and make their mods compatible with the latest version. A personal gripe: mods still also behave erratically when using Nvidia’s Geforce Now, requiring reinstallation every time you play.
Brighter Future?
There’s no doubt that Cities: Skylines II had a troubled start. Being developed during the Covid era can’t have helped, but credit is due to publisher Paradox Interactive for taking decisive action and changing the development team.
Now the game’s future is looking decidedly brighter and many more players of the original may be tempted to give the sequel a second chance. With that Steam summer sale discount running until July 9, as well as discounts on some of the steeply priced DLC, now might be the time to add Cities: Skylines II to your library.
