This is the sort of game your really wish the creators took their time to polish the game a bit more and fix some of the bugs.
The basic idea of the game is very interesting and intriguing. You take control of a city which is split into four sections. The basic idea is to try to keep the traffic flowing so you'll get more points and that way more money to use on the next month. To gain the goal you'll have to determine which routes the transit take to get to their destination, control the bus lines to move as many passengers as possible and generally try to keep the streets in a good shape. You even get to control the timing of the traffic lights, which most of the times work well enough.
If you are into micro managing a city, you'll definitely get hooked into the game immediately. That is, for the first 3-5 months when you are only trying to make the city to work and don't have to care about making more lanes or worry you don't have some of the later equipment yet. Once you get a general grasp of the game you'll want to start to really maximise the profit of your system. But the problem is, for example with the street cleaners, that you can't really make either a long area for them to drive on one go because 1) the AI-line for the cleaners can get broken and/or 2) You can't go through the same road twice one one loop. So, since this doesn't work you'll instead try to make the lines so that you'll have three different lines covering the same area during different times of day so they don't overlap, but clean every part of the roads. But then you can't share the cleaners between the different schedules. So you'll have to have separate cleaners for all of the lines, or you'll have to manually try and remember switching the sweepers when needed. More annoyingly for the perfectionists, there are some areas which can gather dust and snow, but you can't actually make the street cleaners go there. This gets frustrating especially in autumn, because then the game will popup a warning complaining about the streets being unclean, but you can't actually do anything about it.
Graphics of the game are pretty cool. The game has a top-down view, but the creators have kept the perspective in mind and so the buildings don't look flat and everything just looks overall nice and clean. All of the potholes and dust on the road can also been seen on the road, which gives it a more realistic feel.
Controlling the flow of the city by managing the signs and traffic lights is a lot of fun. With the well made statistics screen you can easily see how the changes you make affected the flow of the traffic. The system for making the changes is simple and easy to use.
But at some point the amount af lanes just isn't enough and you'll have to expand. For most of the part this thing works pretty well. It takes a long time for the workers to do the job, just like in real life. Interestingly they show a basic idea of the process, which makes it pretty interesting to watch while waiting for the month to end. Unfortunately there lies a big bug in the system. I now have a long stretch of road I extended, unusable, because the game bugged out on some point. I can't mark the traffic to use the new roads nor can I make the buses use them. So they just are there and... Gather some dust so the game can complain some more.
They buyers should also beware that there seems to be a fatal bug with the medium articulated premium bus. When I bought these, the next time I loaded the save, it didn't work. So I had to revert back a month and go without them. Generally, it's also a good idea otherwise to keep some rolling saves with the game to prevent all of the other oddities the game throws every now and then.
If you don't mind the bugs and can live with them, the game is more than ok. Overall it works well, looks cool and does the city management in a way not (m)any other games have tried to do. I personally have dozens of hours poured into it alreay, and I just can't stop continuing. It's just the bugs that make me want to stop every now and then..
