Recent reviews by ❆🎄Douglas 🎁 🎂

This expansion adds a lot more than just hotels and cassinos. You get HVAC (air conditioning and heating), there are random external things happening that affects your business and you can move tenants which only this worth the DLC. When expanding and reforming the building you no longer need to evict the tenants and get bad reputation.
Hotels are very well done, with customers reviews etc. Its definitely worth it.

The game is, in purpose, very very slow paced. So you have to option to speed things up by buying Nuka Cola packs. Its a pay to play game.

P.S.: I have a stalion in my bunker who impregnated every single woman in my base. I never got see their babies because I was sleeping in front of the game. Nothing to do. I even tried to make him impregnant the other men but didn't work out.

The good:

- Wagons get dirty with the product they are carrying.
- Smoke of steam trains are very detailed, even the positions.
- Sounds of the trains, including horn, clacking, tracks, curves are very detailed and different between trains.
- Trains and wagons wear out over time. You can see dirt and rust.
- Factories expand according to production using more parts of the land.
- Cities change with time. You can see the evolution of buildings, industries and commercial area. New buildings have balconies while old ones don't, just like in real life. Modern buildings have glass, etc.
- Extremelly flexible system to build tracks. You will be able to make X, crosses, joints, basically all you need or all its necessary. I think there is nothing IRL that can't be done with tracks in the game, but I might be wrong.
- Very simple yet very powerfull signals system.
- Steam workshop support obviously adds a lot to the game. You can get new vehicles, wagons, trains, even sounds, signals, depots, stations, etc. Also you can get mods that change variables of the game, which I will talk below.
- You can see people entering and exiting the stations, trees looks great, rocks, benches. You can build them wherever to decorate the stations, tracks and cities. Cities grow and you are part of that, they replace dirty road with asphault. Each person has a house, a workplace and a place to shop. They use trams, buses, boats, trains and airplanes.
- The game keeps being challenging even in late game. Just like IRL transport companies have low profit margin, so you will never (of course it depends on difficult level you choose) have money to just party around wasting it. You will really feel great when you can replace that old train with a brand new shinny one. You value each train and each new vehicle. Of course depends on using the right mod, below.

The bad:

- A bit complicated and not at all self-explained cargo system (that improve with last patch (2nd November 2017, because of an important indicator Rate), which you can struggle with for a long time. I bought this game at launch and only started to really play it now, when for the 5th time I decided to dig in again and figure out the cargo system. Need patience and lots of cash. Many players have the same problem, just check the forums I think that is the reason this game lost many casual players.

- Essential mod for me (and the only reason its thumbs up for this game) is the 4x slower time mod. With default time you will not be able to enjoy the changes of cities according to the era, you will not make enough money to replace or buy new trains as the price of modern trains are absurdly high and since time goes by so fast you just had no time or money to develop your company enough to be able to afford that. For me this mod fixed the game. I recomend Colonel Failure videos for help.

- Cannot choose which cargo goes to the train per station, only per wagon. That can lead to problems sometimes. Because once you choose that cargo for that wagon it will only carry that cargo for the entire line, not only the route. That keeps you from being able to make more complex lines. For boats the devs added 2 types of cargo. So if the boat carries 100 units, you can choose 50 for each type of cargo. That helps a lot. Otherwise just leave it on automatic and the system will figure out which cargo to carry.

- Cannot choose to load half. Only load any, load all, unload all, load nothing. Load 1/2 or 2/3 would be a good option to avoid vehicles either waiting too much or leaving mostly empty and costing more than the trip itself.

- Unfortunately as most modern tycoon games, it lacks of more features that usually is only developed by games with more manpower and a big company behind. Such as: stock market, auctions, competitive AI, decent financial report, pricing, map editor, missions editor, stations appropriate to each cargo type (like coal stations dropping coal to the wagons from the top) or stations with silos for grain or refrigerated area for milk etc. All features included in games like Railroad Tycoon 2 or SidMeiers Railroad, from 15 to 20 years ago :( But the game have at least a campaign mode with missions, fairly creative missions.

This game is really good and very detailed, not in graphics only. I do not like to create stuff and worry about details, and still the game is a lot of fun. Besides what you can read on other reviews, here are some other details:

- Game is extremelly well optmized. THe minimum requirements is 2Gb of graphics card ram, I have 1Gb and the game runs perfectly, no shuttering, no lag and very good appearance.

- If you don't like day/night cycle you can select the exact time of day you want and freeze in that time.

- Camera for rides are extremelly realistic even with headbubble effect.

- Different than what negatives reviews say, the management part of the game is very good. You can even choose how much you want to dedicated to pay loans and change that at any time. How much you want to pay per month for each type of research (max 3 at a time). Raise/lower salaries, train employees, change prices of food and drinks. You can even decide if they go with ice, or ketchup, fries, etc.

- You can refurbish rides, in other to increase their reliability when they are old. You can select amount of time for each inspection.

- You can charge per ride, or per park entrance or both at the same time. Make marketing, etc.

- The game loads extremelly fast. Even with a lot of workshop items. Its 10x faster than Cities Skylines. Very well coded.

I recommend a lot.

If you enjoy Yoot Tower and Sim Tower you will love this game. Its complex and have great flexibility. Plus after launch the devs keep updating it. The game also have steam workshop, so you can download new kinds of restaurants and shops and new items to decorate your tower.

You can make towers with glass walls or with skydromes. You can shape the building in anyway you want. You can have open hall (first floor open to the street). You can put decorations like plants, sofas, vending machines, phones and even shoe shinning stations in the corridors.
You also need to worry about traffic, smells, noise, visibility and how nice the area look. You need to cable electricity, phone, gas, water and tv. There are duplex apartments and all kinds of services to provide such as handyman, child care, security services, cattering, gym, tailoring services, etc.

The only thing bad at this game is that you can't build a hotel. You can make offices, apartments, shops and restaurants, but not hotel rooms.

To be fair Uplink is better. This game is good because you get to use the keyboard. Uplink is a hacking game where keyboard is not used, so the biggest flaw is now solved. Problem is the game lacks a bit of adrenaline.

1) Most servers don't trace you, so you can just hang around forever.
2) Its not clear where you are connected too. Once you hack a place is there opened forever. You don't even have to disconnect.
3) You clear your logs but not the disconnected log, which makes no sense. In Uplink you have to clear logs at origin and destination, seems more realistic.
4) Its too easy to go up the ranking.
5) In Uplink you had money to worry about. Upgrade hardware and buy software. In Hacknet all you get is reputation, that also have no impact besides gettings invitations.
6) The game does not allow you to accept more than 1 mission.
7) The storyline is a bit broken. I made 1 mission that lead to a hacker invading my computer, that leads to another mission and to another mission and basically you cannot accept other mission while the "story" is leading you in 1 way. That made me join an organization and now I cannot finish the old missions. Basically I lost 3 missions, cannot be played.
8) The game UI is a bit limited. I cannot open a file and an email at the same time. Which makes very annoying to take note to things. Althought I cannot complain much on that, as in Uplink I really had a pen and paper next to me all the time, in this game I never used real paper so far.
9) Uplink allow you to do other stuff, such as Stock Market, browse any server, etc. Hacknet is limited. You only get the servers IP when the game wants you to get. There is not freedom besides follow the story.
10) Uplink allows you to choose which mission to make, in the sense of choosing to be a good or a bad hacker. In Hacknet some missions presentation don't have more than 2 lines. You have to accept missions without even knowing what skills you need, what tools you need and what you have to do. Its really 1 path only. And if you try to get missions in different orders you lose them, just like I lost 3. UPDATE: Because of this 1 path only + cannot accept more than 1 mission, you can game over all the time. If you delete the wrong file, edit the wrong record, its finished. People call this bug in the forum, I call this lack of flexibility. In Uplink you could simply give up on a mission and pay a fine. If you delete a file you are suppose to upload, it shouldn't be game over, just some kind of punishment.
11) It uses Unix commands but limit them. For instance you have rm command but cannot be used to delete folders. Cannot download folders either.
12) Find it a bit weird that no special software is required to know when you are being traced.
13) So far the challenge of the game seems to be more about curiosity of the player. Meaning you have to look into every folder and file and read and see what you can find (be aware) rather than having a challenge on the hacking it self, such as limited time, required software, go throught LAN networks, etc.
14) You can hack a webserver, a main frame, a home pc or a cell phone, they all look the same, they all have same file structure, they are all hacked with same tools. A bit boring no?
15) Network map completely unecessary. Its just a harder way to find servers, if you are not going to use it to bounce like Uplink, why have that? Just a window with animated blue balls. A list with a search box and some favorites would do the job, or better, connect always using the line command, IP or name assigned by the user.
16) Once you scan a server and it reveals other computers connected to that, more "balls" appears and its a mystery why some are very distant and some are very close. The distance is based on what? It simple confuses the player as it adds a connection between them and with time the connections cross each other. Well, still trying to figure out why did it this way.
17) I'm already playing this game for hours and all I do is execute programs to open ports.


The good:

a) Very well done interface in the sense that keyboard and mouse usage is well integrated. The key here is keyboard. Its very nice to be able to play the entire game using keyboard only.
b) I like the fact that webserver have website with real images. Just because its a hacker game, it doesn't mean the "normal" internet doesn't exist. Although limited, I liked the www.cfc.com.
c) You can see an effort to bring interesting content to see around. Most servers have files that are not crucial to the missions, things you can read, chats, funny stuff. That really adds to the game and was one of the things I feel lacking in Uplink. Perhaps this is one of the reason a lot of servers don't have tracing mechanism, so you don't have time pressure all the time.
d) Not having time pressure all the time is good, but also removed money pressure and other stuff, which is left it a bit unbalanced.
e) Nice animations. The screens change a lot. Its not the same interface all the time.

Unfortunately I had to get a refund on this one. The IA in this game is very stupid. All my colony died simply because the robots refuse to put metal units for construction. I prevent a water shortage so I build a new water factory. And I proceeded with playing. Instead of building the water factory they kept using resources to make stupid thing such as a bar and storage units.

So what I did? Recycle everything and only let the water factory. Well that was too late. Everybody was diying like there is no tomorrow. And indeed there was no tomorrow, game over.

The problem is that the zoom is very bad, too near, the camere is too limited and the AI is very dumb. I don't think I could ever be able to grow a huge base with this. The workers simply stay looking at the walls of corridors while ore to produce metal piles up at the mine.

The game have pretty graphics thats all. And because of that it makes you wanna play more and more. The trains are very detailed, the wagons, the sounds. But don't bother getting it. Another unfinished game on Steam.


- The game lags absurdly. My machine can run GTA V at full specs no lag. But cant run this game on a medium sized map with 20 trains running without lagging every scroll of the map. The devs already released 5 patchs to improve performance, still same thing. It will never improve. The engne is broken.

- The cargo system is broken. No mods are able to fix that. The industries only produce goods if the entire industry chain is linked. That causes 2 main problems: industry chain in the game is ridiculously simple. The most complex industry you have is: Coal + Iron = Steel = Goods. That's all. Second problem is that if you want to make any changes in your line (put a more modern train, remake a connection) all the industries affected by that line will drop production to zero. Because they cant wait a second more than 20 minutes to receive goods. And to increase production back it take years. That means you lose a profit of millions for years and go bankrupt, game over.

- Game balance is horrible. Put trains, trucks, buses and trams in one game was a huge mistake. A bus makes profit driving a feel blocks, to simulate a town. So if you want to get filfy rich you make a bus drive between two cities and you get more money than a train. Cities are too small, train stations are extremelly huge considering the map size.

- There are way too many industries in the map. You can make the entire thing on trucks and buses, no need for trains. Of course, neither way is possible because after you buy your 10th truck or 10th train the game will lag till you want to punch the screen.

- The game has nothing but connect point A to point B and look at pretty graphics. RRT2 from 1998 has 10x more features (a decent financial report, stock market, buy and sell companies, competition, etc). Well it has less features than Locomotion (a game that Chris Sawyer made while sleeping). Focus too much on graphics all the rest is left aside.


It took me years to write this review, but I cannot avoid this conclusion. The devs are dedicated but unfortunately they made a big mistake on development. I don't know why small devs make their own engine. Use Unity or other. CO made the same mistake with Cities in Motion 1. Very nice graphics, thats all. Lag as hell. If its a small team use your resources to finish the game, not start from scrach.

Not wroth it.

I already saw and played this game long long time ago, and didn't like it. Actually, I didn't understand it. You need a lot of patient to start in this game, as it has huge barriers for newcomers.

So, the game is kind of a CiM 2 on steroids. But don't expect anything like CiM, its a different game. Its more of macro management, more focused on the financial parts.

Lets talk about the difficulties first. Always have in mind the game is Japanese, so they do think different from us ("western ppl?"). Anyway, its a different mindset, and you need to take some time to adapt.

- No real tutorial, not a big community around it. Hard to find information online.
- Most things are not obvious out of the box, so you need to be patient, like how to move the camera etc. Its all configurable, so you need to be patient if things seems weird at first.
- The entire game mechanic cannot be discovered in the game. You will need to go online and read. There are documentation out there and forums, but don't expect to Alt + TAB, cry and get an answer. Sit and read!
- There are no indication of how many passengers are waiting at a station. You can only see when they board the train. There are no passengers or vehicles in the city, only your vehicles. Its an old game and as all old games its focused on gameplay not graphics. So expect a lot of gameplay features.


Challenges I faced:

- The game is extremely hard. You can't just play around and be happy (but there is sandbox mode). You have to carefully think about every move. You need to plan and you need to think. Its like in the real world. You cannot have 1 headquarters and make 1 line and be profitable. A company to be profitable need more than 1 route. You have to make scale profit. You will inevitably have losses for long time till you can have a profit.
- Camera movements are tricky. I even thought about making a video about it. You can move the camera in many many ways, but not as simple and effective as CiM 2.
- Easy route design as CiM ? Forget about it. You will kiss CO feet after this game. You need to program every station, every train, every platform, every intersection. There is a copy/paste tool to make it easier, but in no way its user friendly. For long time I thought: "WHAT? This is absurd. Its really like that?" But then its a Japanese game. Its a different mindset. In a way its quite nice. It allows you to do many things.
- There are no signals. Its all down to schedules. First I thought that was a real bad limitation, but then I realised you can actually program everything to be so smooth that signals are unnecessary. Perhaps that is how it works in Japan? You program every train, every departure and arrival time so the train smoothly goes without getting stuck. And this is what motivates me now, cause its challenging. If you miss by 1 minute, you can screw the whole network.


What is different from other games and make it very complex and deep:

- You have to move construction materials around the city with trucks or freight trains. Nothing is built without it. You cannot make an apartment if construction materials are not available.
- You control city transport but you can also buy offices, shops, apartments and get money from them. Like the old RRT2. You can also build them from scratch.
- Value of the land dramatically change with development, and so your costs to build in this land. Even lay tracks and roads are more expensive in the city compared to rural areas.
- You can build public buildings, such as parks to develop the area. Its like OpenTTD way to make a good for the city when you have more money than you need.
- There are airports, harbours, connection to the city outlimits, and possibility to make roads for the city. AI also exist to develop the city.
- There is stock market, you can buy and sells shares. You also get dividends and pay taxes.
- Very complex financial report. Not that simplistic CiM approach.
- There are big projects such as Maglev trains and airports.
- Track laying is very flexible. Compared to Train Fever, which is very limited, in A Train 9 its great. You can make several types of intersections, Y sections, crosses, etc.
- You can change time speed out of the box. You can make time goes as slow as 1 minute = 1 hour IRL. You can also speed up time about 300x. Yes, that is right, 300 times. No lag, always smooth. The beauty of old games.
- Day and night cycle. Very decent graphics.

Now they are laucnhing ersion 4 which is exactly like version 3 with 1 extra train.

This is Cities XXL model of rip off customers. Do not feed them.