One thing I didn’t quite understand is why the developers made each map so sprawling beyond the featured cities and residential areas, if they didn’t have the imagination or commitment to fill it in with interesting details and landmarks. There’s also little sense of elevation here, as almost everything appears on a single flat plane. While each city is full of skyscrapers, Malmarts, baseball stadiums and basketball courts, the surrounding openness beyond the city limits are as barren as can be, with the same exact blurry pine tree duplicated over and over again. This is even more noticeable for the unpopulated areas surrounding your cities, which are usually more sizeable than the cities themselves, and the most visually uninteresting parts of the game. Citizens will walk in fixed paths with clunky animations, and more often than not pass directly through each other, as if the city has no boundaries to one’s own physicality. Of course, the closer you position your camera to the city streets, the faster the game loses its graphical shine, as you begin to take notice of all the design flaws or programming shortcuts. You can zoom in close enough to see the citizens of your city make their daily commute to work, and zoom out far enough to see the molten lava underneath the different layers of the earth. The game is a fairly solid effort, but then again, creating bus stops and organizing a public transit schedule seems like one of the most tedious and confusing jobs I can possibly imagine: so why would a game that simulates it be any different?Ĭities in Motion 2 features an impressive scale and depth, with simple controls that really make you feel like you’re always in charge of the camera. A direct sequel to 2011’s Cities in Motion, Cities in Motion 2 lets us assume the role of a public transport coordinator once again, but now with better graphics and a few new shiny features thrown in. But how often have you thought about the kind of time and dedication it takes to establish and maintain a public transportation system, and keep everything running smoothly on the most highly-optimized schedule? I had never considered this before, and after playing Colossal Order’s Cities in Motion 2, I’m not sure I really ever want to consider it again. How many times have you taken a bus or the subway to work? For those of us with the daily commute, that number is probably higher than we’d even want to count.
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