An unofficial sublemmy for the game Cities: Skylines.
Thank you for the cross-post. Tried to to it myself but ended up in some obscure/dead community.
TL:DR of the article: Objects in the game are excessively detailed while certain parts of the software are too rudimentary to perform well. The latter might be because CO gambled on the latest Unity release which ended up implementing some important features quite poorly.
I've been playing the game and have been seeing performance drops and over all poor performance as a whole. It isn't show stopping though due to the type of game it is. But yes, I was playing yesterday and saw something fly over the city when I was zoomed in, I paused the game and found it was a police helicopter, and that son of a bitch was as detailed as you'd expect to see in a game with helicopters you could fly your self. The amount of texture and geometry detail was insane for something that is going to be a spec 99% of the time.
That description of the visuals is spot on. It's hard to describe because when you look at one asset, it looks great. But most of the time the overall feel is a downgrade. I'm playing on Geforce Now, so it's not on a low end device. The trees can model well, except when they are glitchy weird paint smudges rapidly shifting LOD for no apparent reason. Some roads look great while others seem lower resolution than SimCity 2000. CS 1 had a more cartoonly look but overall IMO can easily look overall better especially on lower end devices. The cartoon or pixelated style is easier to pull off with weaker hardware. Regardless I wish CO luck. Add bikes and make the LOD not bonkers and it will be a great game.