RipTen Review: Cities in Motion (PC)
Growing up as a child I have many a fond memory of playing Sim City on the old McIntosh computers at my original primary school. Nothing gave me a greater sense of happiness then unleashing cyclones, thunderstorms, aliens and earthquakes upon my beloved citizens… Does that make me kind of twisted? Possibly – however that’s beside the point. Cities in Motion is a title that takes quite a bit of nostalgia from Sim City however that’s where the comparisons cease in what is one of the best business simulation titles on the market.
Developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive, Cities in Motion doesn’t give you the micromanagement of the aforementioned Sim City, instead opting to allow players full, and I mean full, control over the mass transit systems spanning some of the biggest cities in Europe. Instead of worrying about electricity output and busted piping, you instead worry about the max capacity of the buses on your lines, or if the new tram line you installed can handle the expansion of population in a certain district.
Cities in Motion places you in control of a large mass transit company in four of Europe’s major cities, and you’re then tasked with making the system both profitable and efficient for the commuters, something that is quite difficult to do at times. Whilst it may sound simple it’s most definitely not. Things like the fare prices affect customer satisfaction which then in turn affects how many people use your system which inevitably forces you into bankruptcy.
Don’t fret though, Colossal Order has implemented a great tutorial that gives you a firm grasp of everything before it throws you into the immersive campaign that takes place over one hundred years and twelve missions, and once you’re successful in small blocks the scenario will then be available for you to revisit in a free play mode. There’s also a sandbox gamemode that allows you completely unstructured gameplay and your imagination is the only limit to what you do. At times I felt that the tutorial itself though wasn’t detailed enough, for example I couldn’t figure out how to create a ‘Tram Line’ because it never actually tells you to click the ‘Tram Line’ section.
Within the game there is five forms of mass transit; buses, trams, subway, ferries and helicopters. Each has its own pros and cons; for example the bus system is cheap however subject to traffic and slow. The subway is the most efficient in terms of passengers, however it’s also the most expensive and difficult to run. Effectively managing your public transport is fun and challenging, but incredibly rewarding when you have a well oiled machine running on your screen.
Campaign missions contain a plethora of optional side objectives that keeps the gameplay fresh, however they rarely stray from a “Connect X line to X building” formula, something that becomes quite jading quite fast. Completing this optional side missions doesn’t add to the success of your overall scenario, instead opting to reward you with financial bliss and company approval ratings. To keep things interesting and balanced there is three difficulty levels, with each according you a various amount of in-game control and limited funds that you can access. Throughout the 20 or so hours I racked up in the immersive world, I found ‘Normal’ to be more than challenging.
My only gripe with the campaign and sandbox is the lack of maps. At launch there is only four available (Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki and Vienna) however I am sure more could be added on as post launch downloadable content. Playing the same environments time and time again became draining and it didn’t take long for me to master the environments. The available environments look and sound great, with your city bustling underneath you it’s amazing to watch the people go about their daily activities whilst the original and easy-listening style soundtrack hums away in the background.
When it comes to micro heavy games like Cities in Motion, the ‘make it or break it’ feature is almost always the interface and luckily Cities in Motion presents a beautifully crisp and accessible one at that. Your main tasks generally revolve around laying track, placing stops, creating new lines and assigning vehicles to the finished line. The process gets quite tedious at times but thanks to a number of different colored routes you never end up making mistakes or crossing lines. Through a number of in-game graphs and meters you can track the usage, profit and even wait times of your lines, allowing you to ultimately cater your service and refine the experience for your digital commuters. Alongside this is another set of graphs that track your budget, energy usage, wages, advertising, routes, basically everything you can poke a stick at.
Whilst the above features seem overbearing and overwhelming they’re all crucial and essential to running your service properly. The amount of information delivered to you is enough to keep the game moving along with fresh data however not an amount that would make the game trivially easy and ultimately pointless. Simple gameplay mechanics like route colors changing depending on if your fares are too high or low are great and help get you moving in the right direction.
Moving in the right direction is important due to the various meters that show your companies reputation. Customer satisfaction and waiting times go hand in hand, and knowing that made it so much easier to create efficient and fast lines to keep my commuters happy. As mentioned earlier, having an effective system is the best way to go, mixing all the various forms of transport to deliver your customers to their destination. Unfortunately waiting for funds to accumulate in order to buy new lines and vehicles is a monotonous process however there’s a very handy fast forward feature.
Overall Cities in Motion combines a great mixture of flexibility, challenging difficulties and a great interface. All of this culminates into a great product that I just wanted to keep playing and playing. Adding that extra line, jacking the ticket prices just a bit, it’s all extremely engrossing and rewarding if you put the time in to learn the ins and outs of this soon to be cult hit game.
The Rundown:
+ Deeply involving yet simple to understand gameplay
+ Music is playing all the time and never gets annoying
- More maps would’ve been great
- Game has an annoying lack of direction at times
Cities in Motion was developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive for the PC. Cities in Motion released on the 23rd of Februrary 2011 for $19.99. Our copy was provided by the publisher. 20 hours of gameplay was put into the various modes. The game was played on the following system: AMD Phenom x4 Black Edition 955 3.6Ghz, HIS Radeon 6850 1GB DDR5 in CrossFire, 4GB Kingston DDR3, ASUS M4A89GTD PRO.
