Cities: Skylines 2 just received its first update from new developer Iceflake Studios, which replaced Colossal Order at the end of 2025. You might think this would be a prime opportunity to breathe new life into the struggling city-builder. To come out swinging with some big new features. To make the flowers bloom, the birds sing, the babies gurgle in a way that makes you think “Are they happy or about to barf?”
Nope! Instead, Iceflake’s debut patch is utterly obsessed with death. Turns out your idiot citizens have been croaking in completely the wrong ways in Cities: Skylines 2, so Iceflake has donned its black robe and sharpened its scythe to sort things out.
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Not everything in First Frost is about departures from the mortal realm. The patch also reduces trips made on the bicycles introduced by Colossal Order before it moved on to pastures new, by 80%. In short, your citizens are spending less time cycling and more time dying, which I suppose is how exercise works in real life too.
Elsewhere, the patch introduces a bunch of new UI icons for roundabouts, cul-de-sacs, road maintenance depots, pollution types, and more. It updates the onboarding tutorial for new players, makes terraforming tools less aggressive (otherwise known as a terrorforming tool), and makes a bunch of graphical improvements like improved shadow rendering, snow support for decal-based lots, and fog that adjusts according to weather conditions.
Oh, and the update finally switches autosave on by default, which is good, but also kinda wild that it’s only happening now. It took two years, four months, and a change in developer, but Cities: Skylines 2 will now save automatically without player intervention.
While not bristling with new features, Iceflake’s first patch still seems to have improved the sequel’s immediate fortunes. Recent Steam reviews stand at 67% positive at the time of writing, compared to 54% positive overall. Let’s hope this proves a new foundation for a brighter future for the sequel.
