Stationflow

Not a very popular game this time around, but something from a genre I thought I might personally enjoy. Stationflow has you building a metro station network, with many entrances, many train lines, a whole bunch of people, and a whole bunch of needs that those people want satisfied, which aren't limited to getting to their station or exit.

After doing the brief tutorial, I thought the game looked rather simple, so I set the difficulty settings to "very hard". Despite that, it never really got difficult. While there is some thinking involved in terms of efficient planning, it is mostly just a simple case of building paths that connect all points of interest and then adding items and rooms at various intervals to satisfy the miscellanious needs your passangers may have. Most of the difficulty comes from people not just needing these items to exist, but needing to find them. For that, you have to manually put up signs literally everywhere that point to every possible thing a passanger could desire. I do not exaggarate when I say this game is more settings up signs than everything else combined. And honestly, while not completely braindead and predetermined, there isn't a lot of thought to put into how you should label these signs. 95% of the time, just make sure every sign lists everything in that direction if it's closer than the same thing in some other direction that is visible from that point.

I think that mostly explains why I didn't find the game very fun. While it's cool to see the station expand and all the people mill about in an efficient manner, I rarely feel like I designed (or could design) the station particularly well. Just have to make sure I didn't forget anything from a sign, and that I have enough of everything that the passangers want. Not enough of something? Add another. Someone got lost? Must have forgot something from a sign. It's a simple back-and-forth where if a passanger is angry at something, you don't have to think, but just satisfy what they were angry about.
Another thing is that, the game quickly got to hundreds of passangers being in the station at once. That was nice to look at but I wondered, "Huh, how have they handled large crowds?" It's usually in the early thousands that games start to have trouble without advanced programming techniques. Well, turns out they haven't. As you reach 1000-2000 people, you'll "lose", not because you played badly, but because the game stops running at a reasonable speed.

So, in addition to not being a difficult or complicated game, you can't even enjoy Stationflow if you just want to look at crowds going through the station you've designed. At least not for long. I wouldn't recommend this game anyways, but anything that breaks down just as it starts to get to the best parts is clearly something I can't advocate for. There's a lot of building and management games out there, so I'm sure you can find something better, even if you want a peaceful game that doesn't have combat.