Interacting with your citizens is your number-one priority, and thankfully, a number of components ensure that this is a fun and entertaining experience. Strength is restored by dining in local restaurants, and though there is no real punishment for not having a high degree of it outside of a slower run speed and a lower jump, scampering about at near-mach one and leaping over neighborhoods is strangely satisfying. Your character, whose appearance and gender is customizable between stages, apparently moonlights as a superhero, given that you can run and jump from rooftop to rooftop with abnormal ease, provided that your strength is high enough. When you're not laying down roads or trying to find the right businesses to solve your citizens' complaints, you're free to roam around your city and interact with its inhabitants. However, as you progress, this becomes less and less of a problem because at any given time you can look up old friends in your phone book and ask them to move their businesses to your new city, which they're peculiarly always willing to do no matter how many times you may ask.

If you've become friends with your townsfolk-a process as simple as pestering them until they tell you to go away and then coming back five minutes later ad infinitum-you can ask them to introduce you to someone who wants to move into town and open an elementary school, but you still aren't guaranteed to find anyone before the family tells you off for not caring about their concerns and moves away. You cannot simply construct a specific type of building, but must instead rely on email petitions from prospective citizens, which all too often leads to situations in which you're unable to find, say, an elementary school for the family that has a child. They are usually upset because a hospital, police station, or something of that nature isn't close enough to where they live. Although being the only employee of the town complaint department might not sound like much fun, there's something weirdly beguiling about this game that keeps you playing despite its painfully clunky controls and repellant visuals.Īs the resident Metropolis Maker, you'll be dealing with several irate citizens at any given time. Like in its relatively obscure predecessor from 2002, the focus of the game isn't on building cities, but rather meeting and interacting with the colorful inhabitants of your cities, building working relationships with them, and addressing any complaints that they may have. MetropolisMania 2 is a city management sim that borrows a number of elements from similar games such as Animal Crossing and the SimCity franchise to create a charming and inexplicably addictive experience.

Metropolismania 2 iso