Cities in Motion is a modern day Transport Tycoon

In Cities in Motion, your task is to craft the perfect public transport system. It’s not a city builder per se, although it does come with a level editor. Instead, your job is to connect up the various parts of the city in the most efficient way possible – avoiding cancellations, delays, and making sure your customers are happy.

It’ll ship with a 12-mission strong campaign mode across four cities, a sandbox mode, and a level editor. The game spans a hundred years of transport history – it starts with the gorgeous automobiles of the 1920s and progresses to the sleek sheen of the year 2020. Collosal Order, the developer, obviously don’t know that we’ll have teleporters by then.

It boasts seven “social groups” (people who like trains, people who like cars, etc?), five types of transport, and 30 distinct vehicles – including water buses! Which I find are just boats. But still!

There’s been a real gap in this genre of late – the last city manager I can remember really enjoying was Monte Cristo’s City Life. They followed that up with Cities XL last year, which I didn’t play. With no signs of any decent SimCity game from EA, this will probably be the essential city management game of 2011.