Cities in Motion review [PC]

Posted February 16, 2011 by Matthew Lee.

You wait forever for a good transport sim and then – well – one of them turns up, at least. We’re talking games where you’re responsible for a whole infrastructure for one or more types of vehicle that thousands upon thousands of little computer people depend on. This could be building railways across a whole country, or roads going around a city. It’s a niche genre to start with, and one that’s fallen on hard times since the glory days of games like the Railroad Tycoon series or Transport Tycoon.

With Cities in Motion, developers Colossal Order want to win back people who loved these old classics, but also to impress the current generation of PC gamers used to all kinds of visual bells and whistles, who might not have the patience for endlessly tweaking countless different numbers every few minutes. It’s a weird balancing act, and one the game doesn’t quite pull off. While it’s an impressive piece of engineering, there are too many things it doesn’t tell you, or corners cut, for it to really grab many people who aren’t committed fans already.

You’re in charge of managing five types of public transport across multiple European cities from the early 20th Century to the present and beyond. There are three ways to play the game. You can pick sandbox mode, where you choose any city in any time period and begin with a blank slate – everyone walks or travels by car – and a fat bank balance. You can pick one of the scenarios, which challenge you to solve a particular problem (modernise Berlin in the 20s with limited technology, say) or play the campaign, which  works through all of these.

The hand-drawn artwork is a little cheap and cheerful, but the game engine’s a thing of beauty. You’re poised in the sky over whichever metropolis you’re toying with, able to zoom in and out, watching traffic and pedestrians hurrying through the streets. Generic buildings are obviously cut and pasted (one church looks much like another) but the cities do feature individual landmarks, plus should you play for long enough many buildings even change over time. Sound effects are minimal, but polished, and the music’s gorgeous.

Getting public transport working is basically a matter of having places for it to go, then telling it how to navigate them. Put down multiple bus stops, then connect them to form a route, then buy buses and get them going. Trams want tracks, then stops, then a line. Helicopters just need to know point A and point B. The system takes a little practice, but it’s relatively intuitive. If you build it, they will come; citizens would rather take a ride than walk, so it’s up to you to make sure you can get them where they want to go.

However, this is where things start to get a little shakier. You can access any number of overlays that tell you where different social classes live, work or shop and so on, but not exactly where the people in any particular house pass their nine to five, say. You can randomly pick any pedestrian on the street and find out, but this feels like a fairly hit and miss approach to urban planning. The tutorial doesn’t even mention it.

Citizens take some very peculiar decisions when pathfinding, frequently refusing to walk a few more feet to get to a vacant stop where they could join an alternate route. There’s no day-night cycle, but the game does use a calendar, meaning people end up grumbling by a bus stop for days at a time. Traffic can’t overtake, meaning your buses or trams can be held up for just as long while the emergency services put out a fire, for example.

And Cities in Motion is far too heavily weighted towards the metro system. The most effective strategy is to wade straight into debt and build an underground line, given people flock to it, sending money streaming back into your account. It’s markedly more profitable than anything else, and the modern versions so much more so earlier scenarios can feel a bit pointless.

You can learn to live with all of these things, and the developers are already addressing some of them. Once you learn to ignore unhappy citizens as long as some of them are paying and your reputation’s going up, you’re basically set. But like many other little faults, they never quite stop being annoying. Why can’t you plan a route, then pay for it all in one go? Why is there no undo button? Why can’t you zoom out far enough to see all of the city at once?

Again, Cities in Motion is a beautiful little piece of work, and a game that the biggest fans of the genre will shrug and get on with enjoying. They’ll probably want to add a point or two to the score. With achievements, a map editor and the promise of future DLC it’ll keep many people happy for months. But it feels as if one or two fewer features, and better control over all the numbers you need to keep track of, could have produced a game a lot more people might have wanted to play.