" finished yesterday, and shockingly enough for a sim game it left me considering pre-ordering it from Steam for when it releases tomorrow (22nd February 2011).The game puts you in control of all public transport for the city (of which there are 4 – Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, Vienna). Between 1920 and 2020 you have 5 weapons in your arsenal to satisfy your ungrateful masses. Buses, Trams, Underground/Metro, Water Buses and Helicopters. Its your job to make sure your company has a good reputation and is making profit.
-Building Lines
Before you start building your empire, you have to form your company. You get to personalize the colour, logo and name which is a fair level of customisation. Normally I'd want more customization but given that you never have any competition in this game it doesn't really matter to me.
For the purposes of trying to get a solid company up and running I went for sandbox mode in Tutorial Town, easily the smallest of the maps. In the beta you were unable to save, which meant that I never really conquered the map, but in my longest play-through which was about 2 hours, I still hadn't touched half the city. I'm willing to bet that a serious play-through with the full game, from 1920 to 2020 in one of the big cities would give about 20 hours of gameplay.
Building a new bus line consists of placing the stops, then joining them all up in the order you want the bus to travel. You get to see all the buildings that you are ..'servicing' in radius to the stop, so choosing whereabouts on that road you want the stop to be can have a big impact to the amount of customers that will use it.
You then pick the type/number of buses that you want to run on that line. There are 30 different vehicles in total spread over the 5 vehicle types that unlock as they were developed in our own time-line. You'll want small the small speedy buses for quiet lines, and the bigger bendy buses with higher capacity for busy city centre transport.
Once your line is built and you've given it the green light you can start making some money. Keeping tabs on your lines to make sure that there's nothing hugely inefficient happening and customers are satisfied is made easy by quick readable graphics from the top down view. A neat feature is the ability to be scrolling around the map but still keeping an eye on one line/bus in particular by viewing it in the bottom right hand corner.
This game is beautiful. The graphics looked really, really good on my laptop which could only run everything on medium without it lagging. That in itself is an achievement though, considering the amount of detail and complexity of stuff that's happening on-screen at all times, I'm amazed my laptop that's struggled to run most games released in the last year on low settings could manage this on medium.
Developers Colossal Games said that this game is both a City Simulator and a Transport Simulator. And that might seem an odd thing to say, but what they mean is that they have gone to a lot of work to make the city seem realistic and human. Passengers aren't mere numbers, they're people genuinely travelling to and from their homes/work/leisure places. You can click on any of the humans at any time, and find out what floats their boat.
You can find out where they live, where they work, where they're currently travelling etc, and if you wanted, you could watch them live their life in your city.
Combine that level of detail and reasoning behind the transport flow in your city and the cities economy intelligently evolving and you have a city that genuinely feels alive. Over time the city continues to grow and expand, providing you new hotspots to cover like this would-be cinema.
This level of complexity means that building an efficient, profitable and reputable transport empire requires a great deal of strategy.
I found myself restarting the map time and time again to try and get the best 'starting lines'. You don't necessarily want to cover the busiest areas of the city straight away because you wont be able to handle the demand, and then the ungrateful bastards will complain and look all dejected that your buses aren't running on time. (This game almost makes me feel compassionate towards bus companies... Almost...).
The only real thing I found to be lacking in the entire game was competition. I feel like there should be a rival company/companies that are offering transport to the city as well, and you would have to compete for the passengers attention. Without it it kind of feels like there's no real desire or drive to your company. Why bother making more lines when you're already bringing in a sizeable income?
This is where I think the game divides players. It shows its roots as a simulator, I came away from it wishing there was just a little more game in it. But then I've never been a massive simulator kinda guy. I've enjoyed games like Simcity 2000, Theme Hospital, Theme Park, Football Manager and Gran Turismo which have all had a sizeable chunk of simulation in them, but they all also had a game element. I don't know if its going to be enough to turn me off of this game or not. I think to love this game you'll probably need a small amount of OCD, or at least to get pleasure from plans running smoothly and on time.
In my opinion, where this game really stands out is in its modding potential. It hasn't even been released yet and people are modding it from the beta files to make it even more realistic. For example one mod released a couple of days ago changes all the banks in your city to have the name and appearance of real banks. So you could click back onto Shirley and see that she's taking your East District Line to the city centre so that she can go to Lloyds and then onwards to Hamburg Palace.
Modding not your thing? Well then you can sink your teeth into the in-game city creator, which is the same tool set that the developers used to create the 4 cities that you can already play. With the amount of creativity on the internet you know that within about a week of the game's release you'll be able to download London and see if you can do better than Boris, or in my case I'm going to see if I can recreate Southampton. It will certainly be interesting to see how easy the tools are, unfortunately they weren't in the beta.
I'm left with a tricky choice. £15.00 on Steam, and if you pre-order you get 5 extra vehicles for free that will probably be paid DLC at some point down the line. I don't know if I would get bored with it. I didn't during the beta, but then I couldn't save. I'm a big fan of the Civ games, and I felt a bit of the “load game boredom” returning that I had with them. Spending a week away from your civilization and then returning to it meant that you've lost all the momentum and feel of your city. That was enough to turn me off of that particular save file and just create a new game where you can explore a new unique world.
I get the feeling that the enjoyment I got out of Cities in Motion was the initial creating and then seeing how my initial set-up fared. I don't know how loading a game already halfway through would feel.
Also I really don't know whether I have the time for it, it's definitely going to be a massive time-sink.
Hopefully my impressions will have let you know whether this game is for you or not. Basically, if you consider yourself a Sim fan, this
is a must buy. If you don't, then you should try the demo.Anyway, time for the serious matter, which is the better company name? 'Bus'tamove' or 'Ouroborbus'?
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