Even though Cities; Skylines was a great city builder, its size always felt a bit limiting. Without mods, cities were confined to a total of 10 tiles, which could fill up extremely fast. While it was not as small as SimCity 2013's cities, players often found it to be a hindrance and would download mods to change that. Luckily, it seems like Colossal Order listened to those complaints because Cities: Skylines 2 has increased that size immensely.

The tiles in Cities: Skylines 2 may be smaller, but players can buy hundreds of them throughout their city-building adventures. This means that they can finally construct massive cities in the base game without having to download any mods to increase it. Even with its performance issues, that size increase feels like a fantastic new addition that makes this sequel well worth a playthrough or two. And future mods will likely make it even better.

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Cities: Skylines 2's Cities Can Be Massive

In Cities: Skylines, players would start out on one 1.92 x 1.92km tile that they could construct their city with. As they hit new milestones, they were able to expand that playable area by buying up neighboring tiles. In total, they could own 10 different tiles once everything was unlocked. This gave them a decently sized play area to mess around with, however, some players also found that it would fill up extremely fast. So, they would resort to mods to open it up a bit more.

Cities: Skylines 2 map works like the original, but the amount of playable tiles has been drastically increased. When players start the game, they are given a tile that is roughly a third the size of the original game's. While that may seem smaller, they can have a total of 441 map tiles this time around. This means that they can construct larger cities than ever before, with Colossal Order estimating that cities can be five times bigger. And when the mods start coming out, that size will likely increase even more.

This massive size increase means that Cities: Skylines 2 players have virtually limitless freedom to build a city whatever size they choose. Some players may still quickly fill up the entire playable area, but many will likely never even come close unless they try. That means that the fun never has to stop no matter how many players build, which is exactly what a city builder needs.

This size increase is a fantastic change to the formula, however, players will want to be careful not to overwhelm their computers. Currently, Cities: Skylines 2 is suffering from a plethora of performance issues. As cities get bigger, the game will be slowed down even more, and that may result in frequent crashes. So, players will want to ensure that they have a powerful enough computer to handle these massive cities before they use every single playable tile they have at their disposal. While it will likely take a bit before the game breaks, players may want to save frequently as they build the city of their dreams.

Many players thought that Colossal Order would increase the size of cities in Cities: Skylines 2, but they did not imagine it would increase it this much. Now, players can finally construct these massive cities without worrying too much that they will hit a barrier of some kind. That makes for a great freeform city-builder experience that will only be made stronger with post-launch DLC. The studio will hopefully also fix the performance issues along the way so that players truly have no limits.

Cities: Skylines 2

Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive's Cities: Skylines 2 builds on the foundations of its 2015 predecessor. Prioritizing realism, the city-building sim offers a deep economic system and an ever-changing world driven by player choice and creativity.

Platform(s)

PC , PS5 , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S

Released

October 24, 2023

Developer(s)

Colossal Order

Publisher(s)

Paradox Interactive

Genre(s)

City Builder