Cities: Skylines II announced, launching later this year on PC and consoles

Something to look forward to: Developer Colossal Order has announced the long-awaited sequel to its popular city-building simulator. In Cities: Skylines II, players will have the opportunity to design and build the city of their dreams. The two-minute-and-change announcement trailer featured mostly non-gameplay visuals with narration that makes it sound more like a god simulator, but perhaps Colossal Order is simply looking to highlight the many elements that players will be responsible for managing.

Indeed, a description on the game’s landing page notes Skylines II will challenge your decision-making skills with deep simulation and a living economy. The sequel also promises a fully-realized transportation system, plenty of construction options and advanced modding capabilities.

The first Cities: Skylines landed in 2015 for PC and helped plug a hole left by EA’s disastrous reboot of SimCity a couple years earlier. The sim was a hit with gamers, earning a score of 85 over on Metacritic and a user score of 8.7 out of 10.

Colossal Order followed up with a bevy of expansion packs and DLC that collectively iterated on the base game, transforming it into something that was nearly unrecognizable form the original (in a good way), and brought the game to additional platforms. As of last spring, Colossal Order had sold more than 12 million copies of the game across all platforms. Last year alone, the game welcomed more than 5.5 million new players.

Last month, publisher Paradox Interactive announced a remastered version of Cities: Skylines for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. The refurbished game dropped on February 15, delivering a host of upgrades optimized for current generation consoles including more buildable tiles to create larger cities, improved graphical performance, a new environmental control panel to adjust weather and the time of day and a new quick selection tool.

Cities: Skylines II is due out sometime later this year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Game Pass and PC via Steam. Pricing has not been revealed but you can add the game to your wish list over on Steam.