CS:II is a good game. It has lots of improvements over CS:I at a foundational level and it's so much easier to build quickly, precisely, and get great looking results without a ton of headache. I like the North American inspiration, and I love the new highway tools. The game looks a lot better (after fiddling with anti aliasing a bit) than CS:I.

Unfortunately, it's not available on any platforms besides Windows, making it hard to recommend to others or to continue to play myself. It also doesn't fundamentally change the genre in any capacity. It's a more modern CS:I. If you're looking for non-gridded zoning, procedural generation, or a deep simulation, you won't find it here. And as for the simulation - after playing for a while, I find the economic simulation to be very shallow with little control over production within industries besides attempting to *nudge* the city in a direction with different taxation.

I do think the foundation here is better than CS:I, but I think there's still room for a new city builder to really shake up the genre.

CS:II is a good game. It has lots of improvements over CS:I at a foundational level and it's so much easier to build quickly, precisely, and get great looking results without a ton of headache. I like the North American inspiration, and I love the new highway tools. The game looks a lot better (after fiddling with anti aliasing a bit) than CS:I. Unfortunately, it's not available on any platforms besides Windows, making it hard to recommend to others or to continue to play myself. It also doesn't fundamentally change the genre in any capacity. It's a more modern CS:I. If you're looking for non-gridded zoning, procedural generation, or a deep simulation, you won't find it here. And as for the simulation - after playing for a while, I find the economic simulation to be very shallow with little control over production within industries besides attempting to *nudge* the city in a direction with different taxation. I do think the foundation here is better than CS:I, but I think there's still room for a new city builder to really shake up the genre.