Cities: Skylines II
Skip · Strategy · 2023
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $49.99.
- Length
- 28.3h
- Value
- $1.77/hr
- Reviews
- 56% positive
Recent reviews trending up: 74% over the last 30 days against 56% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 (4 GB) | AMD Radeon RX 480 (8 GB), 60 GB of storage. Windows only.
Raise a city from the ground up and transform it into a thriving metropolis with the most realistic city builder ever. Push your creativity and problem-solving to build on a scale you've never experienced. With deep simulation and a living economy, this is world-building without limits.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
February 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $34.99. It has been discounted 17 times in the 3 years tracked here, typically at 20 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was this month, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.
It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 97 percent. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Transport Fever ($29.99, scores 61) and Transport Fever 2 ($39.99, scores 79) both outscore it.
Players rate it 56 percent positive over its lifetime, and the last 30 days run 74 percent. It is aging into a better game than its average suggests. 18 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 384 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 30 percent of the 8,123 reviews written there were positive, against 56 percent overall, and those are 13 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 28.3 hours; clearing it takes 104, which is 3.7 times the campaign.
Still 5.4K concurrent players, 3 years in.
The drop-off
73% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
5,392 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I have hundreds of hours in the original Cities: Skylines, so I bought Cities: Skylines II because I genuinely enjoyed the first game and wanted more of that experience. Unfortunately, the sequel has been a huge disappointment. The graphics and performance have been major problems, and I've spent far too much time dealing with graphical issues, crashes, texture problems, settings, and mods instead of simply enjoying...
Natürlich - hier ist die möglichst originalgetreue englische Übersetzung: English Translation Even 3 years after release, this game remains a massive disappointment. Basic bugs and problems have still not been fixed, even by the new developer. The entire game feels cold, lifeless, and unfinished. Annoying graphical glitches everywhere. Huge hardware requirements. You can only hear ambient sounds when you zoom in...
Amazing building game you build your own city and make the city however you want.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Cities: Skylines II scores 4/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/949230/cities-skylines-iiThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.