Recent reviews by Silver

--- UPDATED 05/13/2024 ---
215 days post-release. Game is still an absolute mess.
Someday I'll get my Ultimate Edition money's worth.
Someday............

-------------------- ORIGINAL POST --------------------
I want, so badly, to be able to give this game a good review. I prepurchased the deluxe edition. I dream of a day I can give this game my recommendation.

But we're not there, yet.

This review is a summary. A larger one is coming.

** The Good **

Roadways have been redesigned to make them easier to work with. I've actually enjoyed my time creating road networks, highways and railways.

Citizens feel real. They've got a life cycle. When the game tells you there are 1500 citizens in your city, it feels like that.

There is some extremely good potential here, but it's overshadowed.

** The Bad **

Graphics are beautiful..... When they load. A lot of textures come and go. Buildings outright disappear at times. Vehicles randomly blink.

AI is trying (my patience, not it's best). Traffic keeps getting stuck in odd places. Full parking lots create traffic jams that can only be dealt with by getting rid of the lot altogether. RCI needs is a bit of a mess at times.

** The Ugly **

Optimization hasn't occured yet. I'm running a AMD Ryzen 9 5950x (4G) with an RTX 4070Ti and 32GB DDR4 RAM. And even then this game still runs poorly at times.

"Not enough customers", "high rent", and homelessness seem to be broken and arbitrary. Once this status is achieved it never goes away no matter what you do.

Vehicles get stuck. On nothing. And it'll tank your entire city. The only way I've found to fix this is to delete and replace an entire road, which apparently wakes the AI back up.

But by far the biggest reason I can't recommend this game? The crashes.

Let me be clear - game crashes are a factor of life for PC gaming. We all accept that at some point, some process with hang and the game will crash to desktop.

But the problem with CS2 is that it doesn't just crash, it *resets*.

I always check settings the first time I launch a game. For CS2, this included turning on autosave. Not sure why that is off by default, but hey.

I'm 3 hours into making my city. Things are...... Running. When the game crashes randomly. No biggie. Boot it back up and away we go. Another hour or so later it crashes again.

What I didn't know is that the first crash reset my settings - turning autosave off. So all that progress? Gone.

Sadly, over the past week this has occurred 5 times. Unacceptable.

*** Bottom Line ***

CS2 is a game with amazing potential. The kind of potential your parents used to believe you had when you were two. But, just like when you were two, it hasn't been fully realized yet and will occasionally wet the bed.

I hope the devs can get this ironed out. I want to love this game. But in it's current state - I can't.

Have you ever picked up a game on sale for something new to play and then the next thing you know it's 20 years later, your beard has birds in it, your toddler is graduating college and it's all happened in what felt like 5 minutes of playing that game?

That's this game.
And any game that can steal time from me like that without me even realizing it a good game.

A few hours in and... so far so good! Isn't often I get to say that about an early access game. But this one has a pretty solid foundation. Excited to see where they go with this, lots of opportunities here.

Game's been out for nearly 3 years and it still has issues. Random crash to desktop moments (really annoying after a successful 4 hour flight and you're on final), sometimes ATC wont' talk, they added helicopters but good luck getting airborne because they all immediately spin out of control no matter what settings you have for assist.

The fact is, for the amount of money this game demands and as long as it has been out, this is simply unacceptable. Recommend something like Aerofly is you don't care about graphics and just want a good flight sim.

Oh, boy - where do I being?

$70 price tag? Sorry folks, I'm not seeing enough changes here to warrant that.
Have to exit out to switch to single player? Why?
Random crashes and bugs? For a $70 that shouldn't happen.

I like the CoD series, and I enjoy the story. But if you're gonna up the price this much you better have everything figured out and there better be some kind of insane improvement and new tech. None of which happened.

Hold off on buying this until it's on sale for like... $20.

Unfortunately I can't recommend this game. It's enjoyable at times, sure. I've had fun playing it. However, this game has been out for almost a year and the devs still haven't included an option to skip the tutorial. If it was a simple "here's your phone, here's your menu, have at it", then sure. But it isn't. The tutorial can take nearly 15 to 20 minutes to do. Not something I'm willing to do each time I decide to start a new file.

If you're a fan of the old Sierra SWAT games, you'll enjoy this one.

Be prepared to do a lot of planning, on-the-fly decision making, and coordination or you won't survive long. It's still in early access, so I won't bring up the typical early access things (AI issues, limitations and such), but I will say this game has massive potential to be something really, truly amazing.

I'm excited to see what comes as development goes on.

I didn't expect a lot going into this, but was highly surprised at the level of detail in depth even in early access. It plays well, handles decently, and while there's room for improvement, for an early access game they've started off great. I hope this game doesn't go the way of other E.A. games where the developer abandons it, because this game has the ability to be amazing.

Don't waste your money on this. To put it simply - this isn't even "early access". It's pre-alpha at best. None of the features actually work. "Skip to next task" takes you to the end of the day (skipping all your tasks), clicking "yes" to turning on tutorials doesn't actually turn on the tutorials, there's a bunch of "?" markers everywhere, but no indication on what to do with them,

In the event you actually manage to trick the game into turning on the tutorials, you get one version of a tutorial in a red box that can sometimes cover up items on screen you're supposed to access AND a second explanation box that's at the bottom of the screen and extreme difficult to read.

Bottom line: game doesn't work. Don't put your money into this.

UPDATED REVIEW:
After spending more time on this game (and a couple of small fixes) and learning through trial and error how a few things work that aren't explained well: I'm ready to change my review of this game to say that it is recommended.

Once you can figure out how to work this game, it actually is quite fun. My hope is that the devs will continue to push updates, including making things more clear (like why NPCs can't get to where they should be). This game has a lot of serious potential. Just hope they keep working on it.

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
For a game that came out three years ago, early access or not, it's just simply just broken.

AI Pathing is a major issue. Employees and customers routinely get lost and can't find where they need to go, with error message being way too vague to figure out what the problem is. I even went as far as to make a simple "one room" airport and after a little while the AI again couldn't figure out where it needed to go.

This effectively kills any chance of being able to actually play the game. It may work for a little bit, but eventually the airport you spent literally hours building and designing will simply just stop working for no real determinable reason.

I literally spent 3 full hours designing, building, and reviewing an airport just to make sure nothing was out of place or blocking access - yet within 30 minutes of clicking "open", my baggage employees couldn't locate the baggage round that was in the next room over from them. I changed checkpoints, moved walls, added doors - nothing worked.

Simply put, don't invest any time or money in this game until they get the foundational basics fixed. You'll end up extremely frustrated and writing a bad review for it at 2AM on a Wednesday.