Cities In Motion 2 Review

Cities in Motion 2 is a rather complex game. If you like managing traffic on a very, very in-depth level, then this is a shoo-in for your affections. It is absolutely a micro-managers dream, putting all aspects of mass-transit at your control.

Upon loading the game you will be greeted with a number of different choices; you can try the campaign mode, where you need to beat the 'levels' by accomplishing certain goals; a sandbox mode, for those of you who would rather traffic managing at a leisurely pace without all the pressure; and a multiplayer mode which is a new addition to the Cities in Motion franchise. The latter is actually quite a standout mode, because it allows you to play either cooperatively or competitively with others, which is not a feature often seen in multiplayer modes within this genre of game.

Selecting the campaign mode, and starting the tutorial showed that Colossal Order have gone for a very realistic style of graphics with the game, much like SimCity 4, and less like the more cartoonish graphics of its predecessor Cities in Motion. Despite not being a fan of this graphical appearance, especially in city simulation games, I have to admit to being extremely impressed with the presentation here.

The detail is truly incredible, and you can zoom right in to see the words "BUS" printed in the bus lanes, and the busy cars and people on their daily commute. You are also able to fully tilt and rotate, allowing you to view your creations from any and all directions imaginable.

The tutorial shows you the basics of how to build the structures you need for your city, whether they be the depots themselves of the different varieties of transportation, or the stops at which your "cims" (yes really) will await their respective rides. You are taught how to design routes for buses for example; so which roads you want your buses to cover, and how they will travel around the city and back to the depot. Of course being British, it grinds on me that everything travels on the wrong side of the road and there are no roundabouts, only intersections.

After the tutorial, which is rather short, you are really thrown in the deep end with what seems like an impossibly challenging-sized city, built over a few islands. Bear in mind that there are no terrain-editing tools when in the game, and that the only thing you can really change in the city is the roads and buildings relating to transport, and the task before you can look quite daunting. There is the option to save and pop into map editor, where you can load and edit your campaign map, or even create one to play on from scratch.

The map editor on its own is very involved. with so many ways to change your city. From making mountains, to generating buildings and adding new roads, and within these categories hundreds of ways to make each feature unique, you could probably spend hours in the creator alone; if that sort of thing takes your fancy. It actually reminded me a lot of the map editing facility provided in the Civilization series of games, only with even more detail.

The most minute of technicalities can be manipulated to your preference. If you notice that your trams are more tightly packed than DLC into modern-day game releases, then you can change the departure times so that they pick up passengers more frequently, or vice versa, if no one is using them. Don't forget to cater for you morning and evening rushes either, because you can, rinsing those commuters for all the pennies they're worth.by providing extra vehicles in those peak windows.

You are able to play around with fares, with different prices for not only day passes, or monthly passes, but also for individual types of transport, as well as a ticket that covers all types of mass transit. This doesn't even factor in the different zones that you can set, increasing or decreasing prices based on whether someone wants to travel within just the one zone, or whether their journey takes them through multiple zones.

If you're really clever, you can use the graphical data provided to discover where your "white collar" cims live, as well as where they work and set zones accordingly, in order to maximise the profit you will be making from these workaholics.

The vehicles that you can buy all require careful thought before purchasing as you'll need to consider how much maintenance they will need per 100 kilometres, as well as fuel consumption, not to mention how many passenger they can carry or what their acceleration is like!

I cannot emphasise enough the sheer amount of information at your disposal. I mean for goodness sake, if you want to go to stop 12 on your trolley line, and look at the people in the queue to discover where passenger 3, otherwise known as Emma Brown works, and whether she is happy with the service, you can!

With so much to think about, providing indications on how to improve your system, you begin to realise that the 100 year timeline you are provided with in each game has the potential to last an incredibly long time, giving you absolutely endless gameplay. Sometimes you will just end up pausing the game to tweak hundreds of little details across the city to boost your coverage and efficiency by the extra 1% you need to win the level and then realise you lost a couple of hours in the process.

Initially the navigation was a slight problem; although the mouse is used to tilt, rotate and select, there is no edge-scrolling, rather W,A,S and D keys had to be used to move around the map. Whilst this is not the worst thing in the world, it was very awkward and took a long time to master, and I say master rather than get used to because even after playing for several hours I was still becoming frustrated with this aspect. Since I began this review, a patch has been released that rectifies this issue and includes edge scrolling, which shows dedication to game improvement and responds to fan-feedback.

Those pesky microtransactions we all know and love have unsurprisingly made it in into yet another game, with Cities in Motion 2 including a store, where new vehicles can be bought with real world monies. At the moment there are only a very few vehicles in the store, but it is a worry that more will be added, especially if they enhance your chances of winning in multiplayer competitive modes for example.

At the end of the day, despite this not being the sort of game I usually enjoy and the rather immense amount of time required to understand it, there is no denying that Cities in Motion 2 is hugely successful in achieving the goal of what a traffic simulation game should be. It is probably one of the best of its kind, in this genre, if not the best and that demands recognition.