Cities in Motion 2 Review

Train of thought.

→ April 11, 2013 There's a science to getting people from point A to point B, and Cities in Motion 2 takes a very technical, not particularly user-friendly approach to its simulation of urban mass transit. Despite significant strides in creative freedom over its predecessor, this is still largely a puzzle about imposing a successful public transportation system on a city that initially doesn't support one. Such a transition isn't easy, of course, and Cities in Motion 2 seems intent on reminding you of that every step of the way, but it's a rewarding puzzle to solve.

Indeed, it sometimes feels less like a game than some staid city-planning simulator tool at the city hall of a major metropolis. Gone, for instance, is the colorful and seemingly

Want more trains? We've got more trains.

hand-drawn art style that graced the original; in its place, developer Colossal Order has carpeted the sequel with drab, blocky cityscapes that sacrifice personality for greater realism. Paradoxically, this look has made it seem like an older game. In the first few hours, even the streets and sidewalks are largely empty of pedestrians, and significant traffic and the combined effect of this initial desolation and an earthy color palette that would look at home in Fallout 3 is not unlike watching a flyover of Pyongyang, North Korea. But it'd be wrong to deny that there's beauty here as well. Zoom in all the way to street level, and you can follow individual citizens (known here as "Cims," humorously enough) going about their daily commutes to gain clues as to where you'll need a new bus or tram stop. Other little details add spice to the faded palette, such as the way fire trucks plow through red lights or the way you can hear the wind rustling through the trees and the water lapping on the shore when you zoom in on a lakeside forest. Those of us in the United States aren't so accustomed to Cities in Motion 2's European vocabulary of trams, water buses, and metros, but seeing them in action quickly gets the point across.
It's also a roomier world, with maps four times larger than we saw in 2011. On a practical level, the map sizes justify the construction of lengthy and lucrative train lines between fare zones. It also allows room for your city to grow, which is handy, because perhaps the greatest addition to Cities in Motion 2 over the first is the ability for your cities to grow at all. While the focus on transportation means you have little or no control over the specific types of building that arise (as you do in SimCity), it means we get to construct dozens of rail and road types with adjustable elevations, and it's always fun to see a new row of buildings slowly pop up along them.
I was initially disappointed with the mere six maps that all feature the same Seattle-meets-New York aesthetic, until I realized that there's already a small but already blossoming selection of player-made cities on CimExchange.com, and that I could always use the powerful map editor to build a city more to my liking. Or I could, if I were willing to put up with the editor's unwieldiness – a UI design problem that plagues most of Cities in Motion 2.

I've always wanted to build my own bridge to nowhere.

I gave up on my ambitious recreation of Chicago's transit system once I realized how time consuming it was to lay straight roads in the otherwise-welcome absence of a grid. The undo option apparently missed the bus during CiM2's development (SimCity has the same problem), so my early attempts left the avenues of my business districts stitched with tram tracks that went nowhere while I adjusted to the grueling block-by-block and a lane-by lane process of laying tracks.
The tutorial, consisting of several heavy blocks of text that demand careful study, wasn't much help, and was all but useless while trying to figure out how to lay a subway line at the right depth with a camera that merely lets you see above and below ground with few hints as to elevation. The menus, too, are the antithesis of intuitiveness. Assigning different purchasable buses or rail cars to selected routes almost always resulted in a mess of pop-up windows, each of which needed to be individually closed. Even navigation presents its own small challenges, as moving about the map requires cumbersome jugglings of the WASD and arrow keys for direction and height, and occasionally holding down Control for more fluid movements. It's not something you can't get used to (and a patch that allows edge scrolling is allegedly on the way after considerable protests), but I still found myself struggling after a many hours.

Here, we study the habits of the wild commuter in his natural habitat.

Still, it's a credit to the strengths of Cities in Motion 2 that it managed to keep me playing happily, to the tune of a soundtrack that sounds like it was lifted from a 1980s educational program. Much of its appeal lies in its commitment to the day-to-day workings of contemporary fictional cities over Cities in Motion's 100-year timelines for mostly unalterable maps of Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna, and Amsterdam – particularly in the way traffic patterns correspond to a day-and-night cycle and the way you can expect bursty rush hours on Monday mornings and Friday evenings.
These additions provide a richer and more realistics experience that extends far beyond mere cosmetics; they add meaning, for instance, to the new abilities to finely tune transit timetables and to set fares at both a daily and monthly level. Here we have a world in constant flux, where neighborhoods shift from white to blue collar and where every stop matters, and the resulting juggle of timetable tweaks, graph study, and fare adjustments delivers a meaty challenge for micromanagers.

CiM2 is at its most colorful when setting fare zones.

Yet the new commitment to realism also means that the pacing might seem unbearably slow, even with accelerated time. Trying to start out with conservative bus lines rather than taking out massive loans and building pricy tram lines, for instance, made the campaign's first surprisingly daunting task of extending 15% coverage to a massive city a real drag. Its realism stumbles, too, in its insistence on matching every line with a depot, and if you're overzealous in your route creation (as I initially was), then Cities in Motion 2 quickly starts looking like City of Depots.
It's all great fun when it works, but enough bugs exist to make the experience frustrating at times. Sometimes mission objectives in the 10-hour campaign mode don't update--and CiM2's pacing is such that it may take you awhile to realize it--and I had the misfortune after a crash (I only experienced one) to discover that there's no autosave function. Cities in Motion 2 also suffers from a lack of variety in the meager assortment of vehicles that reveals an all-too-obvious drive toward DLC. Even so, it excels in the way it lets you approach it at your own pace and in one of three difficulty modes.

Hm. Needs more pop-up windows.

The campaign mode isn't the only mode, fortunately, and I found it best to spend some time in the sandbox mode with unlimited cash so I'd have a better idea of how to use my tools. There's also a multiplayer mode that allows for up to six players to play both cooperatively and competitively – I found the former useful for both showing a friend some of the techniques I'd learned and for speeding up objectives that might have taken me hours on my own. Playing competitively was less appealing, as the few public matches I could find quickly devolved into races to see who could mess up another player's track first. I won't deny that I had fun in the process, but it was short lived. I think it's safe to say that multiplayer is unlikely to have the same appeal as the single-player modes unless you can gather together several like-minded buddies.