Over the last few months, Xbox Game Pass has really gone above and beyond, proving once again that it is the best deal in gaming. Along with some stellar releases in August like Sea of Stars and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Xbox Game Pass brought out the big guns for September 2023, with Bethesda's Starfield, Solar Ash, Lies of P, Payday 3, and a good few more all hitting the service over the course of the month. It seems like Xbox Game Pass isn't slowing down just yet, with October 2023 set to be yet another excellent month for the service, and Cities: Skylines 2 is one of the headliners.
Released all the way back in 2015, the original Cities: Skylines is still widely considered to be one of, if not the best city-management simulator out there. While games like Tropico let players create their own thriving island hideaway, and Anno 1800 takes that fantasy to a historical setting, Cities: Skylines lets players create their very own modern urban cityscape, and Cities: Skylines 2 is set to take that to the next level when it releases for PC Game Pass on October 24, and Spring 2024 for consoles.
Xbox Game Pass' Cities: Skylines 2's Gameplay Explained
For those that have played the original game, or just about any other city-management simulator out there, Cities: Skylines 2 tasks players with creating their very own modern-age city, and its surrounding area. At the start of a game, players are given a sizable plot of land, and they're granted immediate access to a bevy of tools and buildings.
From there, players will be given free rein in how they start building out their city. Players can create some suburban and residential areas, lay down roads, place office buildings, and a whole slew of other feats of architectural wonder. But building a city is only half of the Cities: Skylines 2 gameplay loop. At the same time, players will also need to ensure that their city is running smoothly.
This encompasses a vast range of different urban management features, from enacting tax policies to organizing the layout of traffic to ensure that the town's citizens can move more efficiently across the area. As is the case with every city-management game, the overall goal of Cities: Skylines 2 is to keep on expanding, creating new buildings to entice new citizens to earn more cash to build new buildings and so on until players have a thriving metropolis they're truly happy with.
How Cities: Skylines 2 Improves on its Predecessor
Of course, being a sequel eight years in the making, Cities: Skylines 2 improves upon its predecessor's already-standout gameplay formula in a plethora of ways. One of the biggest improvements is the sheer scale at which players can now expand their city. In the original Cities: Skylines, players were given just nine in-game tiles to work with, which represented 36km². In the remastered version of the original game, this limit was raised to 25 tiles, which equaled 100km². In Cities: Skylines 2, the number of tiles has been raised significantly to 441, giving players 159km² to work with. Similarly, while the first game limited players to having a maximum of 65,000 citizens, Cities: Skylines 2 reportedly has no such restriction at all.
That's only the start of Cities: Skylines 2's improvements. In the management department, Cities: Skylines 2 introduces new public transportation systems, along with a slew of new economy management systems. A ton of new structures will also be available, along with new customization options for each one. Cities: Skylines 2 will also bring some much smarter AI to the table, making the game's citizens act much more realistically.
Cities: Skylines 2 releases October 24 for PC, with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions launching in Spring 2024.