Cities in Motion Collection

I like that this is a macro-management rather than micro-management of transport. You build the stations, routes, and train types and let it run the route. In games like Sim City, you zone for buildings, in CIM the city is already there. You can buy a building or two and demo them for a better route, but buying them is costly. Trains, boats, tram, subway, elevated, and helicopters make for an interesting bunch of options.

The key thing to remember with CiM is it's not about giving you an wide open, empty map so you can start from scratch and build whatever you want. It's about starting with an existing city (flaws and limitations and all) and solving public transport problems with various types of transport: trams, busses, rail, subway, even ferries. And your focus is people. You aren't transporting goods or anything like that. The atmosphere is really charming: music, animations, art. The funny thing is the devs created a sequel that took it from a largely limited top down view to more of your standard 3D city builder view and just ruined it for me. Meanwhile, that would end up being the basis for the Cities series and the rest would be history. If there's a flaw, I think it's the fact that there is no easy way to get an at a glance view of people and trends. You can click on an individual person and find out about where they live, work, and some other traits which can help you figure out where you need to put stops or stations and what type of transportation they would favor (as well as figure out roughly what price to charge for someone like them). It would've been helpful to have a way to filter the view like the SimCity/Cities games to see more of that info. Because of that it can be a bit of a challenge to win scenarios but it's worth trying again to try your hand at another solution while enjoying the environments. The additional DLC packs give you more maps to work with so you can get more playtime out of the game. If you're looking for something open ended like SimCity or Cities, you might struggle with the limitations of this one. But if you're looking for a nice little public transport sim, with little people running around (rather than abstracts of people) and some really nice historical inspired maps, it's worth the pickup.

I bought and installed this last night. I always start with tutorials, as they are generally very useful. Not this one. I'm currently stuck trying to figure out how to add stops to a tram line. The assumption that it would be exactly like adding bus stops to a line is wrong. Closed loop track, placed 3 stops, can't add a stop to a line and have no idea why. I followed the notes I made when doing the bus line, no tram stops can apparently be added to the line I'm trying to make. No documentation to help either, since it's always separate and I forget to check. I came back to get the manual, and thought people should know about this before buying this. So far, the only pro I can give you is that it looks pretty.

No Linux support, which is officially available on Steam.