Cities: Skylines 2
I figured I may as well write something about Cities: Skylines 2, but everybody saying it's the kernel of a fun game launched six months or a year too early is right and I don't have much to add.
I guess where you come down on city-builders depends on how utopian you want them to be and whether you treat them as games or as toolkits for building little dioramas. I'm more interested in prodding the simulation, such as it is, than in placing individual park benches, and the inheritors of SimCity's black box are not where I look when I'm looking for visions of a better future. So, on the one hand, I absolutely do not need the character models in a game viewed mostly from several thousand feet up to be so detailed, and I personally would not have sacrificed performance for things like that. But on the other hand, now you don't need mods to make grungy US-style cities with too many parking lots, and I have to admit I find it kind of satisfying when the cities come out looking like the strange and terrible places where we actually have to live (though I will not be fucking with prisons or gated communities in C:S2, I don't think).
Mostly the issue is that there's an unbelievable number of bugs and/or things that just don't seem to be working right. Water is extremely weird. One of the new services, mail, does nothing except make people unhappy--post offices collect mail and don't deliver it, and post sorting facilities are entirely decorative. Land value vs. resident income seems to be busted given that people struggle with the cost of living basically regardless of what hellish conditions you make them live in and despite having access to high-paying jobs (and the game isn't self-aware enough for this to be some kind of commentary). Industrial zone demand results in truly dystopian factory wastelands, which, I dunno, maybe that's intended, but it seems like a little much even when my goal is uncanny liminal space Americana. RICO demand is strange in general and sometimes doesn't seem to have much to do with how people are using the existing zoning. I have no doubt that making all the numbers rub up against each other in a sensible way is very, very difficult, but I mean ... they could've called it early access, and that at least would've set expectations. One has to wonder if the developers knew the product was underbaked and the publisher said sell it anyway.