I wasn’t a big fan of Cities in Motion, so I prety much just ignored its sequel. But this fully-fledged city building game from the same developers was so well received that I always knew I would have to play it. As it turned out, I liked it so much that about a dozen hours in I went and bought its DLC even though most of its changes have already been patched into the main game just to reward the development team.

It gets so much right that I don’t know where to start. Let’s go with how gorgeous it looks, whether zoomed in or out. Zoomed all the way in, I just love how many little details you can see. You can click on every individual inhabitant of your city and see what they’re up to. Okay. But then I discovered that you can even click on individual dogs and cats and even cows in the farms. Plus the game doesn’t just have cars and trucks. There are scooters, bicycles and pedestrians who are willing to walk a surprisingly long distance to get to where they need to go. Zoomed out, especially at night, you can feel the pulse of the entire city like a living heart with the different streets lit up in different colors.

Then there’s how mechanically complete the game is. Like everyone else, my very first city died a horrible death because, duh, if you pollute the source you draw your water supply from everyone gets sick and dies. It even has semi-realistic water dynamics. At some point when my city had grown past 100,000 people I kept having water supply issues because building all of my water pumps on the same stretch of river was lowering the water level to the point where the pumps couldn’t reach the water. I haven’t even built a dam in this game yet (after more than 60 hours of play) because the suitability of dams depends highly on the map, but I’ve seen the crazy stuff dedicated players can do with the water.

Or the crazy variety of road options you have here and how detailed the road system is, down to working stop signs and lane markings and traffic lights. There are actually fewer public transport options in here than in Cities in Motion but this game more than makes up for it through how much control it gives you over the road system. You can build gravel roads for service vehicles only, roads with either parking spaces on both sides or bicycle lanes, roads with different numbers of lanes, one-way or both ways and so forth. It’s all a bit overwhelming really. There’s even a kind of science on how best to connect a highway system to your regular roads. Just look at how many user-submitted designs for intersections and interchanges there are on the Steam Workshop!

My problem is that there are so many possibilities that I find myself at a loss and I’m tempted to constant start new cities to test new designs. For example, I didn’t realize for a very long time that you can build pedestrian paths and even elevated walkways and that the pedestrians will actually use them. Once I tested this on my then current city and saw it work beautifully I immediately realized how powerful this would be and how this should be a part of the design of the city from the get-go. Now that you can even build underground roads and pedestrian tunnels there are so many, many options.

This game does have its flaws, the most obvious of which there isn’t much of a challenge. It’s easy to run a positive cash balance and you can always let the simulation run as long as you need to build up enough money to buy anything. The city’s economy doesn’t fluctuate due to the external economy as in the SimCity games. There are also no scenarios. Plus even if you make mistakes, demolishing stuff so you can rebuild is free. Eminent domain is a bitch in this game. So this is pretty much a pure sandbox game with the only challenge being to achieve whatever arbitrary objectives you set for yourself. Some of the Steam Achievements do seem pretty hard to get, mainly because it would take a lot of playing to get them.

It’s also kind of kind disappointing in that while the transport systems are complex, to the point where your people are smart enough to change between different public transport options as needed, the simulations for some of the other systems seem rather simplistic. Take education for example. It seems that everyone will try to get as much education as possible and will always graduate. I’d like to have a more realistic population in which not everyone is cut out for higher education and not everyone who enrolls will graduate. I’m also disappointed that while the unique buildings are graphically pretty and impressive, they don’t actually do anything beyond making your city more attractive. It seems trivial to ensure that a gigantic mall will act like a normal commercial area or that the tax office will improve tax collection.

There are so many more things that I wish this game would do too, though those are probably best left in a sequel. I’d love to see small notable events happen and the game will alert you about it and give you an option to jump to it. Currently whenever there’s a crime, the cops will arrive and investigate the scene and that’s it. I’d like to see stuff like car crashes which causes traffic jams, cops chasing robbers on foot, maybe even the firemen getting cats out of trees as stated in the in-game news. Graphically speaking the game already supports this level of detail so there’s no reason why this couldn’t be implemented to make day-to-day life in the city more special. Lots of other people have already asked for disasters so that’s an obvious suggestion. I’d also love to see different seasons, lots of tourists in the summer, snow in the winter with the consequent problems, maybe have rain just as a nice graphical effect, so many possibilities.

So yeah, this is the current king of all city building games. I pretty much always uninstall a game after I’m ever done but I don’t think I’ll ever be fully done with this one. Building a city is so addictive and watching it run well so satisfying and there are already so many cool mods out there to try that I’ll probably keep this on my harddisk forever to return to it from time to time, at least until the sequel comes out.