Cities: Skylines 2 Economy 2.0
Politically fraught bugs aside, C:S2 is a better game than it was last year, but I keep thinking about who it's for and why. Like, the recent economy patch resulted in an early game that demands more micromanagement than just waiting to build services until you have the population for them. You have to strategically underfund everything, mess around with taxes, go hard on specialized industry, and absolutely not buy map tiles you don't need--i.e., to restrain yourself from going right for a massive fantasy city and start with a small farming or mining town. Which is fine if you want something approaching realism, but I wonder who other than real sim sickos will figure all this out before running out of patience and turning on infinite money in an attempt to get anything at all out of this game they bought.
I appreciate the road-building and the new detailing tools and everything. Contrary to what I said before, I've even kind of become a park bench placer. I care enough to be using a bunch of tryhard mods. But that wouldn't be the case if SimCity on SNES and SimCity 2000 hadn't been approachable enough to convince a single-digit-aged kid to care in the first place. I guess now, instead of fumbling around with the game itself, you're supposed to watch urban planners and civil engineers build theoretically sound cities on YouTube or Twitch and become invested that way. The developers of these kinds of games are disincentivized from making trial and error fun. It's not their problem anymore--just watch a beginner's guide. And all the ads for wireless earbuds and personal finance apps that implies.