You know, I always make the assumption that if the government in my country played more city simulators like SimCity or Cities Skylines, we wouldn't be in this dystopian mess of a capital metropolis that Dhaka is right now. Sounds like a running joke, but it should be considered.
I remember playing the original game, spending hours and hours crafting the perfect city. Then figuring out how much of a mess I made out of it. Not only was the game educational, but it also took simulations to different places. Much expanded while having the easiest toolkits to use, and tightest sandbox with a nice shine to it. It carried itself as a true SimCity successor.
The sequel goes bigger, I mean I can look at the polygonal rendering of each of the populace. There are things added from the original, and DLCs. The goal and ambition of making things bigger by changing how you present it, doesn't exactly hide the far more fundamental issues now does it?
Starting it in the main menu, heading to new game, I thought it would regale me with all kinds of options. Maybe even try out a pre-built city to get a grasp of things. No, it's just pretty barebones. Empty zone, just 10 maps of different kinds of terrain with a few outsource connections.
Selecting one would let me choose if I want everything unlocked, with infinite money, and no disasters. Which is also modifiable in the load menu from saves. So I just happened to pick one that is a mix of an archipelago and mainland connection. Game placed me on the island side.
Shorter as it seems, this was a small suburban town at first. With surrounding commercial zoning, and light industrialization on the distance. Offices came later. I wanted to see what happens here, while I slowly and progressively build up my city. But one thing bothered, and that was my income. It was in the negatives. That's strange considering the lack of services present.
Population went up, so I build a fire station, police station, and a clinic. A little more, and I built both an elementary, and high school. After 2KM radius wide of a residential area, and more zoning. At least, I thought it would finally subside the negative. No, it didn't.
This is the part where I've began to have difficulties with the game. Even the happiness meter was green at max. People were happy, why the hell am I not getting any money? Alright, so I've relied on my experience from the first game, and the level up system to keep me going.
And the ugly head starts to rear itself, most of the inhabitants are poorly education, despite the fact that both school had enough pupil capacity. Radio broadcastings keep repeating the same thing, including road accidents, newspapers reporting housing price increases, and more ad nauseum.
I was losing focus right at this point, I thought I knew what I was doing before getting to the real part of the game. I also had to deal with the tutorial tips repeatedly playing while I was placing roads, facilities, and such. Like, what is going on here?
One of the other thing I had to stumble across was building a groundwater pumper near industrial areas. Bad idea, that polluted the water. So I had it removed. And that's the thing with this game. These learning experiences are supposed to be educational, I am thankful that some of those mistakes didn't cost much of my in-game money. Though, that would soon change later on.
The other headache was that a good number of things were locked away, Some stuff like subways, police headquarters, tram lines, cargo ship ports, and so on were only unlocked using building tree points. Earned through leveling up, but building medium and high density RCIO are level locked.
I was at a pretty confusing place right around this point. Just less than 1500 citizens shy of total 5K population. Yet, I was hemorrhaging money, where was I going wrong? I wanted to build medium density residentials, but then my biggest nemesis shows up. The stupid RCIO demand meter.
All it does, is keeps telling me to build low density residentials. Constantly building zonings, areas just to expect change in my earnings was creating tedium. I was somehow becoming bored to tears. I wanted to do something, or it was fast-forward town development. I then checked how everything is going, turns out everybody is more than content with the state of things.
Seeing the citizens happy, but reaping from my utmost frustrations, I've decided that raising the taxes would even the odds. Is this how I show my appreciation, a cruel gesture? Why yes, I pushed the tax up by 8%. Turns out even with high traffic, and all sorts pollutions, they were making money.
This time, I was making money. But while I kept pressing the fast forward button just to hit the next level, waiting and waiting, another problem came up. And it's that few commercial areas were lacking customers. My road planning is pretty shoddy, I'll admit, But that's sort of the game's fault.
This other issue I keep having is when I get overwhelmed by the game, it doesn't explain what I should be doing, or how to fix it. And am sure turning on tutorials won't fix it either. Also, the placement and adjustment of things are super finicky, and doesn't always work.
I've made mistakes of poorly building roads, railways, or subway lines that I thought were properly connected, but no. Not even the mouse could properly highlight it till I was placing it at the right pixel position. I lost money bulldozing, and time redoing because of this problem. Like, come the actual f**k on Colossal Order. Not even the first game had it this bad. Even visual lining is just poor.
After buying tiles, and reaching level 10, I've managed to have access to the main land. From there, I've decided to have a redo as my previous town is overwhelmingly strenuous to manage. I've decided to make large improvements on what I've learned here.
Of course, there was a prebuilt roadway connected to the outside for moving cargo, and trade. But colossal amount of traffic jam, and that made me think "gee, you couldn't have the road wider for the foreseeable future?".
I upgrade it to three lanes both sides, of course I grew up in a poor country, I wasn't aware that the might of western capitalism would give everybody their own automobiles, and it'll clog the transit line easily. I kind of stopped bothering, because the next big problem would really drive me insane. I lost it, I didn't feel like going any further, I just didn't. It made no sense to play any further.
Town 2.0 was going great, didn't help that I later realized even with negative earnings, I was magically making money somehow. Then there's "THIS" other problem. A new update came, and after launching it, I was bamboozled by the assurance of good times coming.
I call it, the garbage apocalypse. Out of the blue, every single establishment had garbage piling up, university students dropped out, the economy was in a standstill. And for some dumb reason, the tooltip would keep lying about landfills being full. I build 3 incinerators costing me 70% of my reserves to outdo the garbage piling. Over 2hrs fixing it, and I called it a day.
Look, this sequel does what the original did much expanded upon. Forget building small towns, I can 8-10 of them interconnected, and build a sophisticated transit system. I can build my own Tokyo if I wanted to. It's one of the big reasons why I wasted 15+ hours in it.
All the familiar concepts have been largely expanded upon like construction, transit lines, much, much bigger playing field, and some large improvements that unfortunately doesn't always work out. If you can call them "improvements" that is. I digress, at the end, I've only covered 20% of the map.
Next I had left was building an airport, but I have to push taxing even harder. Despite the happiness meter peaking, a number of things kept bugging me. And with how poorly dynamic all the systems feel, I wasn't looking into. I can't even get the education system right. I put enough facilities, thought building bus lines fix the reach issue, nothing.
There's also the big visual upgrade, but poorly ruined by the upscaling which makes it weirdly blurry at times when moving the camera. I run a good PC btw, this isn't how its supposed to go. Also, no brightness setting, night time looks pitch black. Figures.
I guess the best way to put it is, wait till the game gets patched. I think it is a worthy sequel, if majority of the issues I've faced, that including stupid A.I. traffic that keeps getting into accidents eventually sorted out. I think that's going to take a long time. Till then, play the original.
I think it should add more things, including more policies to change. There were only total of 5 that I've unlocked. It's ridiculously that's how small it is, even SimCity had dozens of policy options. It's not doing it for me. Not like this.
P.S: It might be difficult to comprehend what's exactly going on with this game from reading this, but the Steam page should tell you the whole story if need be.
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