Got this game a couple of days ago. I was never much of a fan of the first one, but I decided to try out the second installment (either that or Steam is effectively transmiting radiowaves to force me to buy stuff).
CiM2 is a transport game, in the line of the fabulous Transport Tycoon and the not so fabulous Locomotion. Rather than a lengthy review, I'll just give the good and bad points I've noticed:
-Graphics: Pretty realistic and detailed. Nice reflections on the water, trees move with the wind, people walk around town doing their business, streets alight during the nights. All in all, a nice-looking experience.
-Dynamic Cities: This is one of the coolest things ever. While you cannot actually build appartments and shops, people will slowly grow their buildings around the transport networks you lay. You just connected that nuclear plant to a nearby town and there are not enough workers? Some houses will start plopping along your road. A hotel you just linked has no nearby entertainment? Maybe some shops and a cinema will get built in the area. This creates very unique experiences every time you play, and makes the game seem very realistic.
-Route Construction: CiM2 gives you a huge level of freedom when building roads and rails, allowing the construction of some really convoluted networks. Best of all, the game uses an intelligent adaptation system that changes the surroundings to fit your work, making ledges, bridges, tunels, and whathaveyou without any kind of fuss, and making it look right in the process. Just building roads is a load of fun in this game.
-Map Editor: The game comes with a very handy map editor, with several automation tools that make creating new scenarios a breeze. For example, you can lay down some roads and activate the building generator, which will create communities around them; the bigger the street/network, the larger the urbanization.
-Easy Line Creation: Creating transport networks is extremely user-friendly in CiM2. You create a depot, plop some stations around and then create a line, selecting which stops you want. The game automatically finds the best routes (showing it with spiffy flowing lines on the game), calculates the time it takes to reach each station, and even gives you the average and optimal amount of vehicles of each type you'd need to service it. You don't have to manually assign each vehicle, either, as depots intelligently assign available vehicles to the various routes they service. Everything also nicely adapts to the changes you make on the timetables: If you, say, increase the frecuency of buses going though Station A by 15 minutes, the depot will adapt the vehicles to the new requeriments (though it will likely ask you to purchase aditional buses, or you run the risk of them arriving behind schedule and making passengers angry).
-Map Size: Maps in CiM2 are pretty huge. Never as big as those in TTD, but still very large, enough to house giantic metropolises or several smaller cities, with large tracks of countryside and tiny villages in-between.
-Number of Vehicles: The game has very little vehicle variety. Even though you can work with buses, trolleys, trams, trains, and waterbuses, you only get 3 models for each category, and that's it. The shop already has several additional vehicles as DLCs (at 0.99 each), so it is clear the route the devs wanted to take the game.
-Emptyness: I'm still not quite so sure how exactly the game fills up, but it seems that cities are static until you connect them. This means that cities will seem empty and lifeless for a long while, with hardly a car of person walking around. Things get better once you start connecting things, but I found this odd and rather disconcerting.
-No Random Maps: Even though the game has a great editor, I miss having a random map generator. There is already a hefty number of player-made maps (even one uploaded by yours truly), but it's not the same as the good old automagically generated scenarios of TTD.
-Types of Goods: Unlike games like TTD and Locomotion, in CiM2 all you move around are passengers. It is still very fun and challenging, but you won't be playing around with production chains and selling goods to distant cities.
-Music: There is almost no music to speak of, just some themes when the sun goes up or down. You'll be cracking open some MP3s or Grooveshark soon enough.