Recent reviews by Googylon

I wish more games'd be like this.
Not too long, fun game without any ingame purchase mechanics, natural progression, great character developement and a decent story.
Beautiful graphics and sound design, solid gameplay. It lacks nothing, and nowadays there are few games where that is the case.

thorougly enjoyed it, definitely worth its money.
It's not perfect by any means, the story is a bit corny at times, there are a few bugs and the guns in the early game are underpowered. Also, it's too easy with mouse and keyboard, I've definitely not struggled enough for playing the game on hard.
But the athmosphere, sound design and a world and environment that is put together nicely is just great.
Days Gone is the open world game that I've been looking for since Far Cry 4, I think. A game that takes itself serious and isn't a clown fiesta.
TL; DR: 8/10

solid.

held up incredibly well even in 2024.
Works on steam deck. It's awesome ngl, the trailer gives me chills 10 years later.

It does more than any of its predecessors, but nothing of it feels like it has a soul. I don't need 150 hrs of content if they make me feel nothing but overwhelmed.
Somehow I've played it for 65 hours but I've only seen half of it and it doesn't motivate me to explore it any further. The last AC I will have bought.

35 hrs of fun are better than 90-120 hrs of emptiness @farcry6.

it's okay, I guess I'm not that much into zoos like the 7.000 h person

Overwhelmingly Positive for a reason. Worth its money, 100%

It took CO over a year to make this a somewhat decent game.

There was lots of potential and lots of developement and patches finally did reveal some of it.

At its base it is an incredibly fun game that sucks me in. Hours later I find myself at midnight playing instead of going to bed like a responsible adult should.
Road construction and variety, new building zones, nice parks, a bit more interaction with neighboring cities, up to date graphics...

So as you can see, at a first glance there are lots of improvements but the devil is in the details: New building zones are nice, but especially for low density there not enough model variety which results in dozends of similar houses next to each other.
The parks are nice but compared to the parks of the game's predecessor it is a decent and sad downgrade. The parklife DLC of CS1 was so much better and definitely more realistic/lively.
Cars pathfinding is better but not perfect/realistic afterall. They have kilometers of highway to sort themselves for the exit and do it just before said exit, resulting in traffic.
Schools are not satisfying at all, somehow 30 percent of my citizens were going to school (which should be more like 15 percent) and you do notice it. Even tho CO added higher density schools (thank god) you have to plaster schools all over your city to provide enough capacity for your growing city. It is insane. For my population of 620000 people I had to provide more than 200000 school places and even with mods that up the capacity a lot it was a hussle. Give me bigger schools and tune the percentages.

Overall its mechanics are fine for now tho. It's far from perfect but good enough to have a good time.

Graphics are decent, although loading textures and harmless bugs do occur regularly.

The performance is much better than it was half a year ago but it's still not great:
My city of 620000 startet to lag really really hard despite easily exceeding the recommended specs.
A 5900X, 12 cores being completely utilized. Eating away 7.5 gigs of RAM so that I had to close my browser. That's far from optimized if you ask me.

Although I somewhat appreciate them putting in the work to make this game how it should've been, I'll leave my rant about DLCs and pricing here since I'm still frustrated about that.
Buy it in sale if you want to try it and have a decent pc.

The DLC policy is a joke, it is ridiculous.
The game has only been in a more or less playable state for a couple of months now (February 2024) and I'm supposed to pay 50€ on top of the base game to get access to beach buildings and palm trees? For a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ "Expansion pass Waterfronts bundle"?? Oh and btw, there is no beach in this game. No sand colour, no sand itself. You can't paint the ground and it doesn't matter how flat you make the coastline, it won't be a beach which is hilarious to me. A beach property DLC for beaches that don't exist.
Cities Skyline 1 was 28€ since the very beginning, not AAA priced. And I get it, CS2 has a bit more content and looks more spectacular but paying fifty euros twice and more to come? Nah.

Well supported by its developers and with a great mod support
If you're into public transport or transportation in general you should check it out, I really like it.