The most dissapointing thing about CS2 is that the game offers no challenge

I've always been a sucker for simulations, management and tycoon games, which is why I have sunken countless hours into games like Sim City 3000, Sim City 4 and Cities Skylines 1. To me there is something just so fun about trying to maky my city grow, juggling all the issues a city might face, like crime, traffic, poverty, jobs and healthcare. All while trying to keep a balanced budget and maximising the happiness of my inhabitants as I try my best to overcome these challenges and build the utopia of my dreams

However in Cities Skylines 2 I am not faced with any of these challenges. All the gameplay elements are there, but they are of little to no consequence. I have tried and it doesn't matter if your city is just a giant gridlock, without providing a single service, the city will still function and even flourish despite this. The only effect I have noticed is that your city just grows a bit more slowly. I have even disconnected road, power and sewage to industrial areas, but they continue to deliver goods and people go to work, and they will never be abandoned.

So you'd think the challenge would be balancing the budget, but unfortunately money is so abundant that it makes having a currency pointless. I have actively tried to go into the red without succeeding, and if you're playing the game like a normal person I reckon it is impossible to go bankrupt, and you will quickly have more money that you could ever spend. Regardless of what the budget tab is showing you.

This leaves me with a very empty and frustrating experience. I constantly ask myself what the point is. Why should I build hospitals? Why should I care if the crime rate is high? Why should I manage taxes? Why should I try to alleviate traffic when none of it matters?

I would like to contrast this with SimCity 4, where you have to choose between building a school and a hospital because you cannot afford both. The game offers you choice and hurdles that must be overcome. And if a hospital is underfunded you will see people protesting outside, and your advisors are screaming in your ear. This makes the city feel lived in even though the games has no agents, my cities in CS2 feels like an empty, albeit beautiful, husk.

I know that many people who play CS does not care about these aspects, they see it as a brush and a canvas where you can paint your city and treat it more like a model railway where you place individual trees. And that is for sure a very relaxing and fun experience in itself, I know because I have over 1300 hours of CS1.

But in the marketing for this game they have heavily emphazied the improved simulation, and on the steam store page they boast that this is "The most realistic and detailed city builder ever", and when this is what was delivered I cannot help but feel that I have been tricked. I'm sure that there are alot of parameters that can be tweaked and changed, but my feeling is that this is an issue in the core of the game design, and not something that could be alliveated even with mods, but I do hope that I'm wrong.

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Note: This is a repost because I used the wrong flair on my previous one.