This game is a huge disappointment. An unenjoyable experience that is more akin to literally working at your city's transit authority than playing a game which simulates it. If you are interested in this concept, play Cities in Motion 1 instead, for all its flaws, Cities in Motion 1is a far superior and more enjoyable game.

I love Cities in Motion 1 and was excitedly looking forward to the sequel but it fails in every respect. Instead of taking the existing, functioning, and very fun CiM1 and improving upon it, it feels like the developers started from complete scratch. Spreadsheets and boring route planning are the name of the game ("game") in CiM2.

Here are some examples of ways this game is worse than its predecessor, increasing from the nitpicky to the game-destroying:


CiM2 looks like the textbook definition of "generic." The colors are drab, the buildings are uninteresting, and all the cities look and feel identical.


This could have been an excellent area of improvement over CiM1 but instead the UI is just a complete mess. Dialog boxes litter the screen. Important information is buried or not shown. Icons convey little to no information and are reused over and over again providing no distinction between, for example, different buses.


For example, in CiM1 one aspect that I felt was severely lacking was the ability to space out vehicles on a route or provide an actual schedule for their arrival. If you had a long bus line, when you started it every bus would start from the same station; leading to an inefficient route where all your buses arrive at a stop back-to-back and then passengers wait for eternity until they all come around again.

It would have been so easy to simply fix this issue by automatically distributing them evenly and providing a timetable scheduling as a more advanced option. Instead, CiM2 provides the most convoluted scheduling interface imaginable.


There is nothing wrong with this in concept, but in practice they take up such a huge footprint that the cities hardly look like they could support any residents. What city on earth has bus/tram/etc depots seemingly every other block?!


This was the killer for me. I loaded up one of the biggest cities the game offers, excited to tackle its transit problems. I switched to the heatmap to see areas of congestion, and literally, without exaggeration, there were absolutely no traffic problems in this entire huge city aside from a single highway off-ramp.

So instead of needlessly building out a myriad of complex public transit options, I just demolished the onramp and replaced it with a larger multi-lane one with a left-hand-turn lane. Speed up game-time and after a couple months the problem went away.

So... transit problems solved. That was fun.

If this were real-life I suppose I could use my copious free-time as City Transit Manager to perhaps play some computer games. Since CiM2 supposedly is a game I'm left wondering WTF the point of playing it is.

After a lot of hours poured into trying to understand and enjoy this game, I just can't. As much as I love sims and management games, there are too many half-baked ideas and over-simplified systems.

- Zoning is a nice idea, but the brush to set zones is massive and impossible to use with any real precision. The handful of pixels that make up stations, is easily smothered by the massive zoning tool. And precision can be the difference between a perfectly priced line and a total failure.

- Ticket pricing is extremely finicky. Doing absolutely nothing but letting the simulation run can see costs fluctuate from $1 a ticket, up to $30, and back down to $1. All over the course of the week, and with no discernable pattern(rush-hours, night time, mid-day, weekend, doesn't matter). There is no real control, or even logic, to the numbers that are your life-blood.

-Side missions should be a good source of additional income to speed up gameplay, but instead lead the player astray and are not helpful at all. The paths/objectives requested are not lucrative at all and the small rewards do not make up for the costs of the projects requested. Holding onto "population increase" and "vehicle purchase" missions can be helpful, but are passive in nature and can be very time consuming. The point of the game is to build and manage, and to do so well. Why do side missions work to hinder the core mechanic of the game?

- While the game environment will make way for, and adjust to, whatever roads/rail systems you put in place, the control of routing lines, vehicles, and population can be incredibly difficult. Often it is easier to rebuild the existing road system instead of using what exists. But even then, the resulting design or plan the player has can be difficult to implement with the cumbersome and demanding pathing/planning system.

The game has a lot of good ideas and systems that just aren't fully fleshed out, realized, or functional. And what you do get is not very well explained, defined, or even remotely consistent. I did better taking out a massive loan, building two huge subway lines, then letting the game run for hours on end in the background. Trying to build interconnected systems similar to real world cities only lead to spectacular failures and wasted time.

Love the idea of city-building and management games, especially when transport is involved. But as much as I want to love this game, I simply cannot, because its controls and mechanics are infuriating and extremely frustrating.
It is so damn annoying to do anything in this game. After an hour I was convinced that the game is deliberately doing everything the way I don't want it to, from camera movement to adding bus stops to setting schedules to building these damn metro tracks from hell that never go the way you want them to. It's amazing how counter-intuitive the controls are.

It is extremely hard to see the roads. Underground view is not really underground view, it's ground view + metro tracks, which makes both roads AND metro tracks impossible to see. Finding your bus stops is even worse, since their tiny transparent icons blend nicely into the background. Conclusion: You can't see anything. It all blends together.

Building metro tracks in this game is just the worst thing ever. They never remember or understand the elevation you chose. They don't want to connect to each other. If they do, they do it wrongly. Connecting a track to an underground depot is impossible, since the depot track is under the depot, rendering it invisible, so when you try to connect it, the track decides it now has to surface. After 10 minutes of this farce, I closed the game, promising myself to never play this again.

And this could be fixed by a patch. Only that it won't be, because the developers are adding new cosmetic DLC instead of actually fixing the broken game.

I'd love to play and like this game, but I can't, because every time I do, it leaves me frustrated and angry at it.

You know one of those trainsets you want when you were kids but you didn't get it. This game fixed that for me. but instead of just trains, i get to play around with busses, trams, trolleys, waterbuses, monorails... I don't know.. something about controlling the schedules and watching little simulated people queuing up to enter my ride does it for me.. spent hours of my life trying to build the perfect system.

and then it crashes.

Cities in Motion is a game about transporting people within a single city. You are doing this by building trams, buses, metros and boats. This is in difference to games like Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon and most recently Train Fever where you transport people and goods between cities.

The base premise of the game works well with a well executed economy and people having regular destinations and are able to use several different lines to get to those destinations.

The game offers a pretty limited set of trams, metro trains, buses and boats. As far as I can make out if you want more you have to buy DLC:s.

The game has a campaign that is reasonable and also acts as a tutorial. It is not very special though.

Although it is possible to build a profitable tram network, if you want to make as much money as possible, it is almost always best to borrow money to build a couple of metro lines, which will make you enough money to build more metro lines. This makes the game a little bit more boring since not all options are viable.

The ingame time is something pretty confusing, since all lines take strange amount of time. It is easy to build 12 hour lines even in quite small city. And passengers are often quite happy to go to work in lines that take several hours. It leaves the impression that people in these cities are spending all of their time transporting themselves.

100% City Coverage by trams
Replace all roads with pedestrian roads
Charge people 300 for tram passes, regardless what zones
Making 600,000/week estimated
0 Reputation, but people take your vehicles anyways, because your their only means of transportation.

Congratulations, you just took over the city with public transportation, and there's nothing they can do about it.

There is definitley depth to this game, so anyone who likes getting deep into the game systems and learning how they work will get some enjoyment out of this title. However, the simulation is just not up to snuff and it becomes apparent fast, which breaks immersion (if you're looking for that kind of stuff). There are a lot of controls but half of them are so obscured under other controls and options that navigating the UI is about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack! Overall, I would recommend this only if you really want to play a transport sim and you've gotten your fill of all the others out there (but i doubt there are too many of you that fit that statement).

The game is an excellent time killer, but I find that it suffers from a lack of variety in transportation options. Overall I would say it has its fun times, just I wish for more complexity and more varied terrain. Regardless, I recomend the game if it goes on sale.

One of the first things you will want to do is go into the options and enable mouse screen scrolling, which is bizarely disabled by default for some reason.

I played the first game when it came out and was pleasantly surprised, although the game was rather buggy (in relation to traffic and DLC). Although I have to say I enjoy playing the first one more than this sequel and although the games have the same theme they very much feel like different games.

This game also seems a big buggy as I was given several missions\tasks of creating routes between buildings and after doing so still staying at 0%. Fortunately the game allows you to cancel these misisons\tasks without penalising you and shortly afterwards a new mission will appear. The rewards given vs the the costs of creating a route is also quite a bit out. The missions\tasks also do seem a bit repetitive and uninspiring.

I feel the DLC is a bit overpriced and a bit of a cash cow, where some of it should be included with the game.

Although given its downsides the graphics are good, although you are more likely to keep zoomed out in a overhead view most the time as this is easier to place stops, the game is unique but I would still play the original cities in motion before trying this one.

This game is great for those of us who enjoy just to manage the transport aspect of a city, and for those of us who love efficiency. The game is not a city builder in the traditional sense--you can build roads and expand your cities around them, but that isn't the primary focus of the game. That being said, there are some pretty serious challenges to the game, and the mechanics as well. I do have several concerns with the game in general, but I'll get to those in a bit.

Here's a breakdown:

The good: Seriously challenges you to be efficient
Engine is good
Large variety of possibilites, you can make your own city, workshop is available too
Variety of transportation methods
Building engine is easy to use and cool


Bad:
Game is DLC-Based
Stops are not realistic, vehicles leave without being full when peopple are obviously running to the stop
Cars are stupid: they do not take advantage of multiple lanes going to the same place
Height of buildings are not realistic.
When building new roads, game is prone to developing tons and tons of elementary and high schools, forcing the player to demolish them so houses can be built.
People are stupid: all vehicles yield to them.
Traffic lights make no sense
No easy way to make central hubs.

All you really need to get money in a game is one good Metro line, then you can just hit fast forward for tons of money.
I like the game, but it gets boring and repetitive very quickly. Even with all of the DLC, it's really easy to just fall into the same rut ovver and over again. The game does a good job for those of us who enjoy city management, but the content of the game itself leaves a ton to be desired.

I do not reccommend the game to any of my friends.

Beautiful game, full of detail and graphcs. It seems to actually simulate a huge amount of things, such as residential areas, work and leisure places, differing human schedules and income brackets. So Blue Collar Workers will need certain transport and White Collar other. Friday Nights get busy wit hpeople heading out to leisure locations more. It´s up to you to manage your transport timetables to accomdate this!

It is this extra level of depth that makes this game worth while. It´s not just a plain old road builder, you actually get a fully evolving world to manage.

Much better than the original Cities in Motion, which was complete ♥♥♥♥ and very hard to make a profit on (even on Easy mode). Cities in Motion 2 has much better graphics, improved laying of tram and commuter rails including the option of elevated tracks. Routes can become crowded quite quicky if they are long distance and become popular, and it does take a while to work out the best solution to minimise delays and make better profits allowing you to invest back into improving your network.

The multiplayer has an odd few bugs depending on saves between those playing but all of this can be fixed each time by sending the save file to the rest of the party. Other than that it is great fun and adds alot to a genre of "Transport Tycoon" strategy games that no other has before.

If your expecting a simcity alternative, this is not it, however this is a pretty competent and enjoyable transport manager game (Y)

Pretty cool planning simulator. Brings back the addictive feelings I had when I used to play old versions of Sim City. Only this time I don't have to worry about where the buildings go. Just focus on connecting transport to them.

Great game! Much better than the first, I've sunk many hours into this one. The city-building alone is worth it

This was a surprise ! Honestly, I tried demo version some time ago, but... well, it was a demo, and it lacks a lot of things. So I was not satisfied and banned the game. But then one of my mates from school told me, that this game has actually pretty deep and sofisticated level of simulation, and boy, he convinced me to buy :) And I am GLAD that i bought this one !

My mate was totallt right - this game has madning simulation abstraction ! Everything int the city is an object and everything is in computers memory - I mean really, can you believe that ? Now I am playing in a city with 60 thounsand people, an ALL of them all there ! Even theyr cars are there, everything is alive ! You can track one person and watch his every move in the city ! It is amazing ! And not to mention building actual travel lines. There are buses, troleybuses, trams, subeays and omnibuses, which are something like a bus on the water.

There is not much what I can take as a bad thing in game. Souns are 8/10, soundtrack is 8.5/10 - very fitting and adictive, but quite repetiting, so you mayne will end up with turning it off and playing your onw music instead, althougt I must say that combo of soft techno and soft electro is very fitting and I enjoy it a lot - the core simulation 10/10, putting lines 10/10, well... ok, maybe not for subway. I just CAN NOT figure out how to place subway lines ! Honestly, this is a nightmare for me, and I hope I will figure it out, because my city is crying for these :-)

Well as a result, I will give it 9.5/10, and that 0.5 point down is for subway :-) But it is my fault I guess. Mechanics are smooth, simulation works great, and game can even solve some sorts of glitches that may appear, or when I suddenly delete a station with busses already there :-D I testet it a lot and I am trully satisfied. This game will entertain me for months.

Nice game, if you like traffic. The citizens have realistic behaviour. It is challenging to transport them as fast as possible to their homes, their work or their leisure places. The graphics are not very good but in my opinion that's not very important.
Short version; this game is worth trying.

Great game, worth every cent.

to ellaborate:

Its like a better sim city, just with no zonning tool.

The first Cities in Motion was an interesting enough game, more of a proof of concept than anything else, but it lacked a lot in the long-term game.The changes in Cities in Motion 2 are few, but pointed, and stand as a fairly significant departure from how things were in the first game. For starters, you don’t start in the past and progress through the ages – everything is fixed in the modern era. City maps are also much, much larger, and give a more varied and interesting landscape for you to work around. Cities also evolve dynamically now, instead of via a set progression path – players can plonk down their own roads and access-ways, and houses will spring up around them. The City AI will also react to where you start plonking down transport lines as well, so there’s a very to-and-fro dynamic going on. There are also a lot of minor tweaks, most notably in the management of your company and the lines themselves. Such a departure is not without its consequences though – what Cities in Motions 2 gains in more long-term, large scale gameplay, they lose in short-term, focused gameplay. When presented with your first, large city, it can be quite hard to know where to start.The campaign is largely forgettable, offering up a number of generic, unimaginative missions that you will also get during the sandbox game. In the latter, at least, you can decide to forgo a mission when it bores you, during the campaign you cannot.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.Yet the new commitment to realism also means that the pacing might seem unbearably slow, even with accelerated time.Cities in Motion 2's more realistic approach may leave it looking a little drabber than its predecessor, but its focus on dynamic cities, timetables, and ticket prices in a contemporary city in real time make it a significant improvement over its predecessor.

I really tried to like this game. And it does have its good points. The cities look really nice, there's a decent variety in the types of cars and boats you can put out on the streets, and I even enjoyed messing up and starting over when I realized the routes I set down wouldn't work. It was decently challenging, but not hopelessly so.

But! But my real problem is that unless I wanted to sit there with the game running for hours without doing anything, well...I couldn't do anything. I build a few things, I run out of money. Ok! My budget is all in the green, I'll just wait for more money to come in, right? So I wait. And wait. And wait. And then I quit.

Would it have killed them to add one more faster game speed? :/