SpawnPoint - Where Game Begins

Cities in Motion Review, From A Micro-Managing Simulation Fan.

Cities in Motion, the new title from Paradox are a great game for any micro-managing simulation fan. It puts you in charge of building a mass transportation system for a couple of major European cities.

The single-player scenario blows... hard... rally hard. It's like they didn't even try. But, that isn't where this game shines. This game excels in sandbox mode. Starting off in a blank booming city as your canvas throttled with traffic and having to get a reliable, profitable, and popular mass transportation system is what you are tasked with. This is my kind of game. Utilizing bus, tram, rail, boat, and even helicopters you get to build the mass transport system of your dreams.

The game does have pretty decent graphics and keeps my system peaked when running it full throttle. The amount of detail is satisfactory, and doesn't hinder game play at all. It also provides a nice on the ground interface to show you route information, and a nice little mini-view in the bottom right hand corner that allows you to follow a specific bus, tram, or whatever. The ambient stuff like trees, planes, and high speed rail is a nice added touch that rounds off the look of the game.

Paradox also tried to bring a global economy kind of thing into the game wherein, your rates, your passengers, and other things are factored based on the "economy". It is a nice try to make the world you are in feel larger than it actually is; however, it kind-of backfires in the event that this fact is easy to overlook and hard to account for. I would have much rather seen a failed attempt at a multi-player environment.

A nifty thing they did with the game was to create little mini missions that reward you for building routes to a specific location(s) on the map. This gives you nice little objectives that you can choose to do. You are rewarded rather well in the event you complete the tasks. These tangents provide interesting challenges while in sandbox mode, and help prevent the game from stagnating.

The game to me fails in the interface department... epically. It feels clunky, and although the hotkeys are intuitive, they are not well centralized on the keyboard. This forces me to look down to move from the view keys (QWEASD) over to the other side of the keyboard. The view is not controlled via the arrows keys, which defies most conventions. They even use the num-pad in an awkward fashion. In the end, the interface suffices... barely and delivers what it has to in a series of windows that force you to heavily use the mouse.

The other killer part of this game to me is that it is hard to get into the cities when the names of the roads and locations are 25 character long Dutch words. This kills the imperishability factor for me. If they come out with an expansion pack that covers other cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, I will buy it in a heartbeat to play in some cities whose locations I can pronounce. To mitigate this fact, they put in a map editor... but I don't feel like building New York from scratch.

Overall, this game satisfies my need for a modern Sim City 4 replacement. It far surpasses games like CitiesXL, and I look forward to either an expansion or a follow-up on this game. I had high expectations for this game, and in the end, it met the vast majority of them.

For those that don't want to read the above, here is the readers digest version:

1. Great for SimCity addicts.

2. Decent graphics.

3. Crappy interface.

4. Great sandbox mode.

5. Bad keyboard layout.

6. It helps to speak Dutch.

7. worth buying.

8. Great replay value.