If you've ever been annoyed at public transport, here's one for you. See if you can do better.
Cities in motion is a simulator game where you can be the one to work out the public transport of a city. Sounds easy enough, just some bus lines here and there. A tram line on this road here, and everything is connected.
And then you give it a while, and there's 8 busses waiting for that one bus stop with a waiting line of 250 people. Clearly you didn't think that one through. But that's okay, where a normal job as public transport planner would have you fired for that, here you can try again or fix it somehow. So then you can add subway stations, boats, and helicopters, and before you know it you're covering the city and hours passed.

The interface and controls are easy to learn(If a little odd at times), and the game mechanics are easy enough as well. However, mastering the game mechanics and planning out the city public transport is much harder. You'll have to go through several attempts to figure out what goes wrong and how to fix it, and you may want to take a look at the actual public transport system in your city for ideas.
Edit: Also, it has some inaccuracies. Amsterdam does not look anything like that. And you can just build a subway tunnel under the Berlin wall. Replacing old vehicles is a pain too.

As for the technical details, it's surprisingly good. Every citizen appears to be modeled*(*I didn't count them. at least a large enough amount of them to make the cities feel alive), and you can follow them through their morning commute, shopping trips, and visits to others. And this is all supported by the game mechanics, you can set a citizen as interesting person, and the game will show you a portrait of him where he goes. (Warning: Long) In my latest case, I looked at a factory in Vienna, and found a red car driving from the top of a parking garage(Mentally following it through the roof as it drove down) next to it down to the ground floor and onto the streets. So I asked, why is this person not using the public transport system to work and back? Wilhelm Klein, factory supervisor - Drives by car from his home, connected to the public transport, to work, also connected to the public transport system. He then went shopping at a big department store, which too was connected by public transport.
After that, he went to a church far outside of Vienna, in a smaller village where I did not yet expand to. He then returned home.

I didn't have the money, but I figured I'd have to connect that place somehow when I did get money. So I went on to look around town, just watching people board the bus and go around. After a while, Wilhelm was moving again. Another day at work. This time, he wandered to the tram stop down the street and was quickly picked up by one of the passing trams. He then got out at a connection to the subway, but instead took the bus at that same subway station, and rode it all the way down to work.
A while after, he boarded the bus again and I watched him go back to the tram station for what I assumed to be the way home. But not this time. This time he went into the subway, so I look at his info screen and see his destination is a ministry building near the town center and then back home with a direct tram line. I connect the extra village with a busline, and I speed up time a bit.

When I check back on Wilhelm, he has a new job. He is hired as secretary in the ministry building he went to way back then. Perhaps he couldn't handle his supervisor job at the factory, or perhaps he never really wanted it in the first place.
But either way, Wilhelm is happy now, and he can go with a direct tram line from his home to his work, and from there, anywhere in Vienna he wants.

Mission succesfull, the citizens of Vienna can stay in motion

I had stepped away from CIM afer being dissappointed by CIM 2 unrealistic and minimal cities, cartoonish loading screen and compromised mechanics. I downloaded it again along wth some DLC's and I find myself enjoying it more than ever. Beautiful graphics, excellent mechanics, makes recent games like Train Fever and others primitive at best. If I could just get a bus that holds 500 passengers.......

I actually prefer this original CIM more than CIM2. It is its own unique game, so you can't really compare it to another game. Its not without its bugs and annoyances though, which include Traffic Jams (Saving, Restarting and Reloading sometimes helps) and more passengers than you will be able to transport.. The DLC vehicles also get added into timeframes they do not belong in, making it unrealistic to the point where you will ignore the small vehicles and just go for the larger\bigger DLC vehicles which carry the most passengers and non DLC vehicles are stupidly slow and handle small numbers of passengers. However overlooking this, it is possible to play with an erection and you can find yourself either quick playing to complete campaign tasks or modifying, changing and adding to existing routes. A few have complained about DLC price but this often appears in sales and cheap on Bundle websites with the DLC, so keep looking and if you see it on sale with the DLC or in a bundle, its worth a go.

Cities in motion has to be a game that sometimes can get hard to understand when it comes to the building part, but overall if you play it long enough you will eventually understand.

Great game - really detailed and good fun. Can be really hard to keep up with demand at the start though.

This game is addictive and fun. I really enjoy it. Recommended for those who like management sims.

Some people would say this is better than Cities in Motion 2, I don't understand their way of thinking, I now have both games and after only an hour and a half this one has become very boring and repeatative. OK so CiM2 may not be perfect but it has far and away much more going on, much more content and far more choices on what you can do, sorry but even at £5 (10$) this game is boring.

Good transport game. i prefer cities in motion 1 over 2 because this one is a bit more casual. so if you want a more casual expirianse chose this. otherwise cities in motion 2 is there for you! :D

Personally I love transport and simulation games so this game is pretty awesome. Do not get the second game though, it is quite hard and the layout is messy 7.6/10

For the benefit of other Linux users: Bought and installed under Linux: (unsupported) Ubuntu 13.10, tutorial crashes all the time, which is rather annoying. Can't recommend, but YMMW.

I really want to love this game, but I feel like it's punishing me for playing it. Games should make you feel relaxed, and shouldn't frustrate you. I constantly have this feeling that the game is buggy and isn't made super user friendly. That's sad, man, that's so sad.

Cities in Motion is a transport management sim.

The interface is a little cryptic and this game is by no means Transport Tycoon, the campaign is a little clunky and the graphics are acceptable.

Railroad Tycoon 2 and Transport Giant are better games, but they're old. There aren't that many transport games out there and this was the best at the time I bought it.

The game doesn't explain itself well at times and can be frustrating but is overall an enjoyable experience.

I loved Transport Tycoon and tought that this might be a similar game, but in comparision it is very dull and not very well made. If you like the idea of the game you should try Locomotion instead, which is a remake of the old classic Transport Tycoon.

I spent many MANY hours playing Transport Tycoon, OpenTTD, and both Aerobiz games for the SNES, and this falls into the same vein of transport business simulation. Thankfully, it also lives up to that standard of excellence. It's very easy to grasp some of the core concepts, but it is definitely more difficult to master the game. If you're into business simulations, this is absolutely worth playing.

Brilliant! I've spent more time on it than steam says (offline play) - a lot of it as well. It's a great transport strategy game. The work of a genius, and can run on my laptop with only 6GB RAM and c**p everything else. From that point of view, it's even better than number 2. The campaigns are great fun, and challenging, for example, they ask you to build a tube link...but you only really have enough money for a bus route, so do you save up, or hope the line is a success.
Also the ability for custom games, and map creation make this a truly amazing game!

Do you have a nice CPU?
Have you always wanted to murder your local public transportation manager and fix everything..?

It's relaxing, challenging, sometimes even tense.

Avoid the sequel

9/10

It was for me great fun to play this game in the begin - However there is a super enoying bug that will happen eventually in any city with metro trains and renders the whole system unplayable.

Usually in the late stage of the game there will be always an important metro station where trains rediculously will just not leave before they are completely full (which takes very long because they are waiting very long for single people who are just entering the station)!!! This causes heavy jams in front of the stations where trains que up infinetly. People on subsequent stops can hardly enter the train thus get angry. Also you can not add more trains to the line because they will only add to the que in front of this one faulty station

This is messing with the whole (!) metro nework and there is absolutly nothing what you can do about it ...

The bug is known but the developers sadly don't care about it.

Also beware of high CPU Loads and memory leaks. After some time the Game will slow down as hell.

The missions are mostly funny, but instead of encouraging you to build a reasonable network to guide you it rather forces you to build non-profitable lines.
There is in general not much assistance or feedback to understand why your system is working or not as well as the statistics are not so useful.

The mod system is great - very active community.

bottom line: In the beginn it's a good fun to play this game but it lacks long term motivation because of enoying bugs and lack of reasonable feedback.

PS: The screenshots a bit misleading. Please use google picture search if you want to get an impression of the game interface

This is one of those games that takes a certain kind of player. If you love building and management games than this is a lot of fun. I have played both this and the second Cities in Motions. Both are fun, but in different ways. Cities in Motions 2 offers you a lot more control of how you can lay down your tracks (and roads because the sequel allows you to build your own roads) and now limit you to the four cardinal directions and diagonals. But the cities feel a little bare bones because they just have buildings.

In the first Cities in Motions the cities have train stations, ports, airports, and the roads and highways actually go off map instead of a loop leaving you in this mysterious cities that is completely cut off from the outside world...

Though Cities in Motion 2 compell you to build depots where you buses, trams, and subways which makes repairs and maintainance much easier on you.

While the game play is honetly a little better in the sequel the city feels more alive and real to me in the first game. I actually recommend both, but check out let's plays on youtube to get an idea of them if you want to know what you're getting into.

I marvelled as I had finally managed to build a sustainable public transport network with happy employees, happy passengers and 100% population coverage. Then I heard a dingle and saw a notice in my status bar, a hippy type man wanted a route added from the town centre to the bushes in the corner of the map tile. I declined.

Do I care about public transport more than anyone else? No, definitely not. But this game is very well made. Good tutorial, motivating challenges/missions, adjustable skirmish mode, good graphics, nice achievements,...

Get it! Btw. it's even better than Cities in Motion 2. Funny but true.