Cities in Motion 2

Cities in Motion 2 is great upgrade of the previous Cities. Bigger, better, but also much, much easier. [May 2013]

Cities in Motion 2 brings some interesting new elements into the gameplay structure of its predecessor. The game had some bugs, but Colossal Order worked hard to get most of them fixed soon after the launch.

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.

The learning curve is steep and if you’re easily frustrated you might consider going back to the predecessor. But if you’re willing to invest time and a lot of trial&error in this mass transit simulator, behind all the glitches and the useless tutorial you’ll find a motivating diamond in the rough that shows a lot of potential and keeps you awake longer than you’d like to admit.

Cities in Motion 2 offers needed immersion along with a well worked out economic model, and city processes interconnection, which will captivate you so much you are going to ignore the game's visible flaws.

Cities in Motion 2 is a true paradise for those who love to plan everything into the smallest details. Other than that it offers too little variation to stay interesting for long, with boring graphics, drab environments and slow gameplay. Cities in Motion 2 is better than its predecessor, but no classic in the sim-genre.

The biggest problem with Cities in Motion 2 is that this game is extremely user-unfriendly. Gameplay is sluggish even with the highest time compression and the interface contradicts ergonomics and intuition. [CD-Action 06/2013, p.80]

Fantastic Game, its not some dumb downed game that you can pick-up in 10 minutes. It takes lots of thought and skill to get it working as it should! I would highly recommend it!

A very interesting realization of transport sim ideas, but there's a lack of content and could have been done so much more!

A great game hampered by just one important thing : UI. First hand, this game is a great mass transit simulator, not a city simulator like Sim City series. Though the Sim City 5 is a total disaster, in hindsight of city building simulator the game you should be purchasing is Sim City 4. Sim City 4 do have their own mass transit, but off course, Cities in Motion 2 have deeper simulation on the mass-transit side, and way less simulation on the city building. That's why we can't compare this game to Sim City series, and why this game will not kill Sim City series. The game itself is great, and fun. There are myriads of options for your mass transit. You can have buses, trolleys, water buses, metros, and trams, though I miss helicopter rides from the previous series. The premise of this game is simple : Connect residential areas to commercial/industrial areas (just like what we must do with mass transit in Sim City series). Each mass transit mode have their own benefits and disadvantages. Buses are simple to build and cheap, but slow and have lower capacity. Trams require tram tracks to be built, but faster and have higher capacity. Metros require metro tracks, which are expensive (and hard to be built) but have even higher capacity, unhindered by traffic, and way faster. The only downside, but a big one, is the UI. I can live with cluttered information, or too much information on screen. But here are things that are very bad in Cities in Motion 2 : - It's really hard to build Metros, due to weird elevation system. The elevation system itself is great, but the lack of information of how much depth I am at is making us hard to do anything underground. - It's hard to build on built-up areas or city with tall buildings, because the game doesn't have the option to "show only your transportation system" - The scheduling is confusing, but can still be handled if you experimented with it. That's it. If you love simulation, this game should be grabbed.

This is the worst city sim ever. I have never played such a boring game, it looked so bad that I quit after 5 minutes. The only thing it was good for was to leave playing in the background to get my playing cards which I could sell to recoup some of my money that I foolishly wasted on this game. Also, no tutorials, so when you play be prepared to constantly be looking at Youtube to learn how to play.

A promising game ruined by poor programming and design. The UI is unusable it took me about 2 hours to be able to build a metro line that actually works. Unhelpful error messages during the process don't help. Nor does the fact that you can misclick by one pixel and not realise meaning you're bankrupt and have a line that doesn't work. Other examples of the terrible UI include lists of vehicles that use the same icon for every vehicle yes, you really have to mouse over each entry in the list to tell them apart, and even then you still need to know the capacity associated with each vehicle name, because even when mousing over, only the name is actually displayed if the vehicle is currently in a depot. Very helpful and well thought out... The tutorial is as clear as mud it consists of telling you to do things that are self evident such as place some stops and connect them but DOESN'T tell you how the game actually works or what to look out for. The end of the tutorial is supposed to be you building a metro line, but the only info you're given is "build a metro line". There's no info on how to actually place metro tracks so they're not red (i.e. unplaceable), or more importantly, how to build the metro underground. So it's click click click, that's not working, click click click, god this is frustrating... click click click, you know what I give up. Once you've finally surmounted these unnecessary issues, you're left with a game whose core mechanics are flawed. City growth can at best be described as "random" and more truthfully as "broken". Industry spreads like cancer all over a city, especially to high value areas with high traffic where high rise offices and housing ought to be. Build a new road and the "intelligent" game plonks 3 schools right next to another. Then, 3 minutes later, it removes the schools and build something else for nor apparent reason. Passengers would rather walk for 30 minutes than go another stop on the bus they're already on. Ticket prices require changing every couple of hours, but this again seems random rather than due to anything related to your network and quickly becomes boring and repetitive. Unfortunately, the game is already in that stage where DLC is being released regularly, so chances are the core mechanics aren't going to be fixed. What the devs really need to do is take the best parts of CiM 1 and the best parts of CiM 2 and weed out the serious flaws in both games. If they actually got their act together, they'd be on to a winner. As it is they've released 2 games that are halfway there but have such serious issues that you begin to wonder if the series is ever going to go anywhere. At any rate, my advice to anyone still considering buying CiM2 would be to wait for the next game. This one doesn't cut the **** and ends up being an exercise in frustration rather than fun.