Revolutionizing Urban Planning: Unveiling Cities: Skylines 2's Ultimate Solution

City builders may not dominate the gaming industry like other genres, but they often provide a more captivating experience than the biggest shooters and RPG adventures on the market. Managing residential and commercial areas, and ensuring a city has enough power to keep the lights on, can make time slip away effortlessly. With the success of Paradox Interactive's original Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines 2 aims to join the ranks of city builders that have happily absorbed gamers' sense of time. The developer plans to expand on the experience in almost every imaginable way.

Cities: Skylines excelled with its extensive range of base game features, combined with a wealth of downloadable content (DLC) that made it even easier for gamers to construct their dream cities. Cities: Skylines 2 plans to enhance the base experience by incorporating several of the original game's DLCs from the beginning, along with introducing entirely new mechanics. Many of these features aim to simplify the Cities: Skylines experience, such as automatically running water pipes beneath streets instead of manual installation. One particular new feature tackles the challenges posed by landfills and resolves some of their major issues.

Cities: Skylines' Landfill Problem

Cities: Skylines offered an enjoyable experience of constructing a magnificent city, while also addressing the challenges that come with managing a city. Similar to SimCity, garbage collection played a vital role in Cities: Skylines. Players could easily purchase a landfill, strategically place it, and watch as garbage trucks roamed the city, gathering trash and delivering it to the landfill. Initially, this process appeared just as straightforward as providing clean water to the residents. However, managing trash collection proved to be more complex.

In larger cities, two main issues frequently emerged with the landfill system. Firstly, landfills would rapidly reach their capacity, necessitating the relocation of trash to different landfills or incineration plants. Consequently, the original landfill became redundant for waste disposal, compelling players to construct additional landfills. Unfortunately, players were limited to only one type of landfill, causing a continuous saturation of landfills that hindered the typically accessible nature of Cities: Skylines. Thankfully, Cities: Skylines 2 introduces an intuitive and deceptively simple solution to this problem.

How Cities: Skylines 2 Fixes Landfills

In Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive is focused on improving the experience from the first game. One major improvement is the flexibility in landfill shapes, allowing players to customize the dimensions to their liking. This not only makes trash collection easier, but also gives players a greater sense of choice in their city-building endeavors. Compared to other city builders, such as SimCity, which have declined in popularity, the thorough enhancements made by Paradox Interactive in the sequel are promising for the genre. The developer has been highlighting various changes and improvements in Cities: Skylines 2 through YouTube videos, with the new landfill mechanics being just a glimpse of what's to come. Only time will tell if these improvements will surpass the success of the original game.

Cities: Skylines 2 releases October 24 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.