Once you’ve made your village into the metropolis of the title, a free-play mode is unlocked, allowing you to carry on building without any defined objectives. To an extent, this mode reveals quite how important the tight, objective-based structure is in the game.

After a while you may well find yourself tiring of simply optimising your city, but by then you’ll have had enough hours of fun to have lost the right to complain. It’s a symptom of the cut-down strategy that’s employed here – the relatively uncomplicated relationships between happiness, crime and pollution make the city appear more obviously algorithmic, and hence less organic, than the original game whose blueprint Metropolis uses.

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