Cities in Motion 2 - Metro Madness (DLC)

I want to like Cities in Motion 2 more than the evidence actually permits. On paper, every element of my ideal transport sim is present: a living city of individual citizen agents with fixed homes and jobs, a full day-night cycle with rush-hour pressure, timetable scheduling that lets you tune departure intervals per route, depot capacity management, and a dynamic growth model where your network choices physically reshape which neighborhoods develop. That is a genuinely interesting decision loop. The moment you connect an underserved residential district to a downtown commercial hub with a well-timed tram line and watch the population tick upward, you feel the depth the developers were going for. The problem is that nearly every new system shipped in a half-finished state. The timetable mechanic sounds transformative on paper, but the in-game time compression means your rush-hour buses depart on schedule and arrive the following day, making precise scheduling largely theatrical. Vehicle breakdown rates are punishingly high early on, and the campaign, instead of scaffolding systems gradually the way good strategy games do, dumps you into bare maps with all transport options unlocked and no structured progression to speak of. Sandbox mode is where most players sensibly end up, and it works better, but a weak campaign is still a weak campaign. The UI compounds every problem: placing underground metro tracks on multiple levels requires fiddly angle-matching that wastes money and patience, and the tutorial spends its time on basics while leaving the genuinely complex stuff, like metro line construction and profitability modeling, almost entirely unexplained. For strategy players who can tolerate a steep learning wall, there is a real game here. The citizen-agent simulation, where individual cims follow daily routines and generate organic traffic demand, is more sophisticated than most city builders of its era. You can build bus depots, lay dedicated tram rails, route waterbuses along coastlines, and eventually construct multi-level metro networks. Cooperative and competitive multiplayer was a novel addition for the genre, and while it shipped with technical issues, it gives the sandbox unusual replay legs. The Steam Workshop is active enough to find custom maps and rule sets that paper over some of the base content's thinness, and a string of vehicle packs added buses, trolleybuses, and trams that expand fleet variety for those willing to invest in DLC. If you played the original Cities in Motion and came for the charm of historically modeled real-world cities with period-specific vehicles, you will be disappointed. CiM2 replaced that approach with unnamed generic metropolises, a realism-first visual style that reads as drab compared to the original's character, and a complexity dial turned up several notches without a corresponding improvement in feedback quality. The data overlays showing population type distribution by zone are useful, but the game rarely tells you clearly why a route is underperforming or what optimal looks like. You are expected to experiment, lose money for the first several hours, and gradually internalize systems that a decent tutorial would have explained in twenty minutes. For a certain type of player, that grind is the point. If you want a transport sim with genuine systemic depth, Workshop support, co-op play, and the patience to build your own mental model of how the economy works, CiM2 delivers. Come in expecting Cities: Skylines-level polish or a gentle entry point into the genre, and it will lose you in the first afternoon.

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