You sign up creating an account, then verify your email, then what you download is just a launcher, for their full game launcher download not the game itself, which is half a GB, then you open that, login to it, THEN you scroll down to the free game and click it, place order showing $0 charge, then they tell you they're sending an email which never comes.
Then you wonder what happened, then you click on the game in the launcher, again, THEN you can choose install, THEN it downloads, then when it finishes, no shortcut to it so looks like you have to use the launcher every time. Game install is 12GB, everything included 13GB.
Next some Paradox installer thing pops up, now you have a Paradox login window and login. Except if you don't have a Paradox account, now you have to make that too. Next after submitting that, they send you a confirmation email and you click that to confirm the email address, except that email doesn't come right away.
Around the time you check to see if your email provider blocked it as spam, the email arrives, you click it, you login, you're prompted to make a username, then agree to a privacy policy, then a terms of use policy, then an End-User License Agreement.
NOW you finally try to run the game, but then there's a popup where you again have to click read the privacy policy then accept, then do that again for terms of use.
Around this point, you have lost all interest in playing the game but want to see where they put the shortcut to launch it. They didn't, there isn't one. They instead made a shortcut to their launcher overlay which you didn't need at all to play the game, when they could have just made a shortcut to cities.exe in the install folder you chose, to directly launch it.
A lot of work for a free game, but at least the required system specs are pretty low.
Also, once you get it working, you are better off not running their platform-loader, as it continues to run in the background after you close the game, and serve you up ads till you shut it down manually.
If you instead make a shortcut to the cities.exe, and use that instead, their ad server platform doesn't run. I was thinking that this is price you pay for a free game but no, this is apparently how they set it up for paying customers too.
So, jump through some hoops and get a free game and pay attention to the details. If I end up liking it then it was worth the bother, but this is way way more **** to wade through than most free software these days.
Comments & Reviews (2)
You sign up creating an account, then verify your email, then what you download is just a launcher, for their full game launcher download not the game itself, which is half a GB, then you open that, login to it, THEN you scroll down to the free game and click it, place order showing $0 charge, then they tell you they're sending an email which never comes.
Then you wonder what happened, then you click on the game in the launcher, again, THEN you can choose install, THEN it downloads, then when it finishes, no shortcut to it so looks like you have to use the launcher every time. Game install is 12GB, everything included 13GB.
Next some Paradox installer thing pops up, now you have a Paradox login window and login. Except if you don't have a Paradox account, now you have to make that too. Next after submitting that, they send you a confirmation email and you click that to confirm the email address, except that email doesn't come right away.
Around the time you check to see if your email provider blocked it as spam, the email arrives, you click it, you login, you're prompted to make a username, then agree to a privacy policy, then a terms of use policy, then an End-User License Agreement.
NOW you finally try to run the game, but then there's a popup where you again have to click read the privacy policy then accept, then do that again for terms of use.
Around this point, you have lost all interest in playing the game but want to see where they put the shortcut to launch it. They didn't, there isn't one. They instead made a shortcut to their launcher overlay which you didn't need at all to play the game, when they could have just made a shortcut to cities.exe in the install folder you chose, to directly launch it.
A lot of work for a free game, but at least the required system specs are pretty low.
If you instead make a shortcut to the cities.exe, and use that instead, their ad server platform doesn't run. I was thinking that this is price you pay for a free game but no, this is apparently how they set it up for paying customers too.
So, jump through some hoops and get a free game and pay attention to the details. If I end up liking it then it was worth the bother, but this is way way more **** to wade through than most free software these days.
Thank you!