Recent reviews by AdvancedFollower

This game works well as a commentary on the fertility crisis in South Korea. When it comes to romance and relationships, playing this game is like stepping back into the 1950's. You literally cannot have children until you're married. Your zois can't even live together as romantic partners (just roommates) until they're married. Teens are completely asexual and can not have any romantic interactions with each other like they can in The Sims 4. Until your zoi is married all they can do is eat, work and sleep, which I guess explains why no one in SK is having kids.
Zois who are attracted to the same gender have it even worse. They can't even marry (just become "partners") and since all townies are straight by default and all teens turn straight when leveling up into adults, there are no romance options outside of zois you create yourself.

After months of experiencing constant CTD's, and trying everything from updating drivers, snake oil "registry tweaks" to undervolting and underclocking my CPU/GPU, I realized it's this DLC that's causing at least a large number of those CTD's, particularly those that happen when you move the camera around.

So if you too want to pay €7.99 to have your broken game become even more broken, go ahead.

I was expecting ATS in space but honestly it's more like Pacific Drive in space. The default difficulty is frustrating (not impossible, just frustrating if you're expecting a relaxing trucking sim in space). If you want a rougelike truck sim in space you'll probably enjoy this but I mostly found it frustrating. You're constantly scavenging for batteries and other consumables, repairing your truck etc. Even if you turn down the difficulty settings, the controls are frustrating and I found the lack of visibility from the cab to be a major issue. The hood of the track takes up a lot of your view to the point where I'd fly upside down to improve visibility, because unlike an actual truck sim, traffic and obstacles can appear from underneath your truck as well as in front of it, making you smash into things you didn't even see.
It feels like they didn't playtest this properly before releasing it.

It would have been nice as a freebie or as part of a larger $10 pack covering everything you need to make beaches.
With just a handful of "coastal" residential buildings (with a few variations), it feels incomplete. It's worth no more than $2 max.

At this point in time the game is simply too broken to recommend. At launch everyone was focusing on performance (which is better now, but still very poor), but now that the game has been out for several months it's obvious that it's broken in so many other ways. The economy is chaotic and unpredictable, traffic barely functions (excessive yielding, illegal u-turns, cars taking weird shortcuts through parking lots and assets or on pedestrian roads, cars, buses and trams simply getting stuck with nothing blocking them, holding up traffic), and the constantly rising land value eventually causes everyone to outprice themselves. Simulation performance (simulation rate) tanks in larger cities unless you have one of the very latest 16+ core CPUs. It's like the devs only tested the game up to ~20k residents.

There are barely any assets which makes each new city you start look exactly the same, in contrast to the huge variety you can achieve in the first game. Many essential tools like path visualization are missing. There aren't even any bikes or bike infrastructure, which feels particularly out of touch given how important that has become in real cities. Even in terms of visuals, the game is barely better than the first one. Many 3D models have completely unnecessary details, while basic features like anti-aliasing, shadows and global illumination have serious issues like flickering, ghosting, shimmering etc. There are also several downgrades, like the lack of billboard 3D grass or reflections on the roads during rain. The game also lacks many animations like firefighters putting out fires or residents visiting parks or entering buildings like schools. The game simply feels empty and barren, and it's ugly to look at, especially in motion.

I'm still confident the game will be "good" one day, but it's obvious it's going to take much, much longer than anyone anticipated. Like years, rather than weeks or months. At this point it barely feels like it would be ready for Early Access, let alone a full release.

This game was a pleasant surprise, I was expecting it to be a lot more buggy and janky given the reviews. I like the immersive aspects like having to get out of your truck to repair it, refill fuel, buy food and supplies etc. You can also go into the rear of the cab to microwave your food or sleep, and there's a hunger bar. Those might seem like small things, but they really enhance the immersion. While ATS/ETS2 do a great job of simulating the actual driving, they sorely lack in immersion and people have been asking for those features for years. There are a few bugs and a few stutters here and there, but overall the game runs fine on my mid-range system (Ryzen 3800X, RTX 3060 TI). The driving physics feel a bit arcade-like (more like driving a sports car than a truck), but the actual driving feels fine. The game works well with my Thrustmaster T150 wheel and SHH Shifter, but with an XBox controller or keyboard, the steering is very sluggish.

Edit: CS2 was just announced. I guess this explains why they let CS rot after dumping a bunch of assets and half-baked game mechanics in a final avalanche of DLC and "mini-expansions". It's a bit sad to see this once great game end in such a cash grab.

Edit 2: So a new patch *finally* dropped which supposedly fixes most of the game-breaking bugs. However I'm leaving the review as negative, because the game was essentially broken and unplayable for 189 days between between 14 September 2022 and 22 March 2023.

Edit 3: Changing this to "Recommended". While I still think CO completely dropped the ball during the last year of this game's life, the fact is that it's probably the best city builder available at the moment, given the disastrous state of CS2 and no other real alternatives.
While CO never completely fixed all the bugs before abandoning this game for CS2, there are mods that fix those bugs while also adding a huge amount of QoL and features. The fact that the game no longer receives updates or DLC is almost a good thing since it means mods won't constantly break with new updates, and CO won't introduce new bugs that then need to be fixed. Instead of CS2, get this game plus all the DLC and a few mods and you'll be set for years to come, while waiting for CO to fix up the sequel to a playable state.

Original review:
Since the 1.15 update in September 2022, multiple game-breaking bugs have been introduced affecting the vanilla game as well as some previous DLC. None of the bugs are related to mods.
Instead of fixing it in 1.16, they introduced even more DLC and barely fixed any issues.

When you post about the bugs on the official forums you just get a response like this:
"We believe we have a fix for the issue, but I don't have an ETA on when the next patch will be."

While previous patches have introduced some bugs (the "Allow intercity trains" button was broken for probably a year), this is a new level of neglect. I have nearly 1,000 hours in the game and I have played since release. The game is currently in an unplayable state with no way to roll back to a working version. I cannot recommend it at this time.

I died. I ded.

The game can be quite relaxing and fun in small doses, but there's just too much grind and repetition to ever feel like you're progressing. Once you've done the first chapter, the quests dry up and it's just a matter of grinding for money so you can pay off the uncle and buy the furniture factory.

To be able to afford the furniture factory, you'd have to make over 120 trips with a full load of dry planks. Just the driving alone would take 10 hours, not counting the time it takes to cut and transport the logs, dry the planks etc. It would probably add up to several hundred hours just to complete this partial goal in the game, and by that time you'll have clear-cut every forest in the game world. This is why according to Steam Achievements, only 11% of players have bought the furniture factory, 15% have paid of the uncle and only 4% have gotten married in the game (and who knows how many of those gave up and used cheats). Even Elden Ring has a higher completion rate.

This showed up in a random Facebook ad some time ago and I bought it because of the positive reviews.
It has some cool features in theory but it's just total jank at this point. The dev doesn't seem to be very active either (last updates 9 months ago at this time).