It’s a city transport sim! Now, before you run off back to the
grey-brown shooters, stop for a second and consider what Cities in Motion 2 has
to offer you.
You take control of a brand new transport company who’s
tasked with developing transport networks across a number of cities through a
campaign mode, multiplayer or sandbox game. To do this, you build new infrastructure
and construct routes to get all the busy sims from A to B, whilst extorting as
much money as you can from their pockets.
The cities themselves are all pre-constructed playgrounds
for you to start building your empire in. They do slowly expand outwards which
you can encourage by building new roads, but for the most part, everything is
ready for you to build on from the get-go.
Taking the first scenario as an example, you’re presented
with a sprawling city that has big hubs in the middle surrounded by smaller
island blocks. The objective is to increase your network coverage up to a
certain percentage. This is represented by circular catchment areas around each
stop you place, showing how far the sims are willing to walk to get on public
transport.
I leapt straight in and brought up the cities information
window to see where there were large concentrations of blue-collar worker
houses, and their workplaces. This colour coded every building to give a clear
picture of where there were hotspots and straight away, I noticed a big clump
of houses next to some workplaces. Great I thought, setting up a quick bus
route here will guarantee a nice bit of starting income. I couldn’t have been more wrong. No one gave a
damn about my buses and I was immediately losing money.
And this was after I had played through the tutorial, which
takes you through how to do everything in a nice and concise manner. Three
restarts later as I kept making bad routes, I decided to try something
different. I went to the centre of the city a built a giant trolleybus route up
and down the main avenue. To my surprise, every stop immediately had people queuing.
I had to immediately buy extra vehicles and amend the timetable to reducing
waiting times between services. With my business saved, I experimented with
other long routes between nearby hubs. All turned out to be successes; and then
I realised one thing the tutorial neglected.
Sims are more than happy to walk short journeys and don’t
focus your routes on one demographic. With those mysteries solved, I took out
loans to increase my network and meet the objective. Building new routes is
simple enough and you can pause the game to build; which is a good job because
one way streets are a pain in the backside. Just as you think you have your
route sorted, you realise that the loop you planned on using to turn around is
a one way street in the wrong direction! To be fair, the road markings are
clear and with proper planning, one way streets aren’t a big problem.
Construction is quick. For a bus route, all you need is a
few stops and a bus depot. With that sorted, you jump into the route editor and
simply create the route you want between them. The game is smart enough to work
out the shortest route between any two stops, but you can tweak the route is
you prefer by adding some free waypoints. Other transport options include
trams, metros, waterbuses and the aforementioned trolleybuses. These are
slightly more complex whilst providing faster and higher capacity services.
Beyond setting up the transport infrastructure, you’ll have
to manage both your staff and ticket prices. The game is kind enough to inform
you when tickets are becoming either to cheap or expensive, so you don’t have
to keep constantly checking them. Your staff are also simple to manage. You can
set the wages of your drivers, mechanics and ticket inspectors which affects
how good they are at their jobs, which is clearly displayed in the same window.
You only have to decide the amount of ticket inspectors you hire, and this a straightforward
choice of; does hiring another increase how much I earn in penalty fares? The
economy of the city does vary up and down, so these values do have to be managed
throughout the game.
You do get thrown a few extra side objectives to pursue over
time. These usually involve building specific routes or building more lines.
There’s not a great variety, and worse, the feedback on your progress is
incredibly unresponsive; to the point where you begin to wonder if it is
actually bugged.
The main problem of the game is caused by the depth of the
sim. As it’s tracking and updating so many different variables like the population,
traffic density, energy prices and so on. It means the game begins to chug after
a few hours of play. I set the game speed to maximum at all times I wasn’t
building and it still ran slow on my modest quad-core. I ended up leaving the
game running in the background at several points, simply because it didn’t need
my attention until I had earned some more money.
You can increase the game speed with your own custom rule-set,
or play in one of the smaller cities. Both notably increased the speed when I
tried, but it feels like having to use a work around and custom rule-sets can’t
be used in the main campaign. However, you can share your rule-sets and player
built cities via the Steam Workshop. So there’s plenty of additional content
that you can easily tap into.
Ultimately, I enjoyed Cities in Motion 2 for the first few
hours, but after that I found the game became handicapped by a lack of variety.
There are only a handful of vehicles to choose from and once I had the game
figured out, it was too easy to turn a large profit. I can’t recommend it
unless you are very specifically looking for a Sim that fills the niche between
Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD) and SimCity (four or below, five is horrible). Alternatively, if you’re
looking for a very relaxed game, Cities in Motion 2 does provide satisfying laid
back experience. Just remember to put on something to listen too like a podcast
because the music is bland and repetitive.
