Cities in Motion

I have a soft spot for transport sims that force you to think at the route level rather than the city level, and Cities in Motion is exactly that kind of focused, unforgiving exercise. Colossal Order's debut from 2011 puts you in charge of public transit networks across four historically rendered European cities - Vienna, Helsinki, Berlin, and Amsterdam - spanning a campaign that runs from the 1920s through to the 2020s. You are not building the city. You are trying to make sense of one that already exists, laying bus stops, digging metro tunnels, floating waterbuses down Amsterdam's canals, and yes, occasionally dispatching a helicopter route when you have more ambition than budget sense. The depth is narrower than a grand strategy title but steeper than it first appears. The game models seven distinct social groups - blue-collar workers who want cheap fares, white-collar commuters who want speed, students and pensioners who need affordability, tourists who will tolerate anything, businesspeople who demand comfort, and unemployed residents who are cost-sensitive above all else. Getting a route to serve two or three of these groups simultaneously is where the interesting decision-making lives. Do you run a tram line through the factory district to catch morning shift workers, or does a bus loop connecting the university to the shopping district produce better margins? The financial model adds loans, interest rates, ticket pricing, advertising campaigns, and vehicle maintenance as levers, none of which are overwhelming but all of which matter when you hit a cash crunch at the wrong point in a scenario. The tutorial handles newcomers reasonably well for a 2011 sim, walking through stop placement, basic route logic, and financial controls in a dedicated scenario rather than drowning you in pop-ups mid-game. The interface is genuinely clean, which is not a small achievement in this genre. Where the game struggles is in feedback quality - when a stop is unhappy, the game does not always give you a clear signal about whether the problem is frequency, capacity, or route design. Vehicle capacity is also unrealistically low across most modes, including metro trains, which can make mid-game route scaling feel like fighting the engine rather than the problem. Traffic simulation has some well-documented quirks too, including the counterintuitive situation where a successful transit network can actually worsen road congestion due to weak car AI. These are real rough edges that were never fully patched out. The built-in map editor and a community that produced custom cities and vehicle mods add meaningful longevity. Thirteen DLC packs eventually expanded the base game's four cities to include Tokyo, Munich, Paris, London, St. Petersburg, and US cities among others, so the content ceiling is high if you go the full collection route. The historical progression across decades - playing Berlin in the post-World War One era and then returning to it after the Wall goes up - gives the campaign a texture that purely sandbox transport sims cannot replicate. Sandbox mode is also present if structured scenarios feel too constraining, with a selectable starting year anywhere from 1920 to 2020 and full freedom over network design. Players who bounced off Cities in Motion 2 (which stripped away much of the original's charm in exchange for added complexity) often return to this entry specifically for its atmosphere and approachability. This is a niche game that knows exactly what it is. It will not scratch the itch if you want to zone land or manage city budgets. What it does offer is a surprisingly meditative and occasionally maddening loop of transit planning that rewards patience and punishes overextension. Come in expecting a focused sim, not a city builder, and you will find more here than the Metacritic score suggests.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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