Cities in Motion 2: Good News for People Who Hate Buses

Is there anyone in the world who genuinely enjoys their city's transportation network? Is there a human being alive who waits for a bus in the morning thinking to themselves, "My god, this is just the most wonderful thing"? Probably not. Because no matter how well designed the transit network is where you live, no matter how much mind-boggling engineering went into it, you can always think of ways the system could inconvenience you slightly less. Therein lies the strange appeal of a game like Cities in Motion 2.

Cities in Motion 2 is a PC strategy title from Finnish developer Colossal Order where your job is to map out, build, and maintain a thriving transit network in a major North American city. In other words, your opportunity to show your hometown how it's really done. On a basic level, you do things like construct roads, build depots, and adjust public transportation routes to accommodate the flow of people going from home to work and back again.

But it's not all quite so easy. When building your metro system, you'll need to examine the surface street traffic to decide whether you can get away with a road-level train track or if an underground tunnel or elevated track might be the better option. A random traffic accident might clog a major thoroughfare, forcing you to temporarily reroute your buses to avoid the congestion. And as you continue to build a thriving network, people suddenly realize your city is a pretty decent place to live, so you'll see new homes popping up and putting additional strain on your transit network.

A lot of this sort of thing was featured in the original Cities in Motion, which came out in 2011. One of the features that's brand new to Cities in Motion 2, however, is the concept of a full day-night cycle. The strain on your roads and public transportation vehicles will vary depending on the time of day, from the night owl routes at 3:00 a.m. to the overloaded streets during rush hour. So in Cities in Motion 2, you're given the ability to create time tables for your transportation system to deal with the wildly varying number of citizens on the go.

And that's Cities in Motion 2 in a nutshell. It's a game that gives you the chance to live out the fantasy of constructing the ultimate transportation network so you can take the train into work tomorrow and gleefully think to yourself, "Pfft! I could do this better!" while knowing that it's true. Expect to see it later this year on the PC.