SIMCITY - REVIEW

Being excited about the new revamp of Simcity having not played a Simcity game since ‘2000’, I preordered the game months before the release date and even bought the British city set (being the anglophile that I am), despite it costing £8, a ridiculous amount of money for just a few extra details. So that along with the digital version set me back ~£53 and am I happy with this bug purchase? No. Paying that much for a game with an awful launch which masks underneath what is a seriously damaged game I can’t help but feel bad for those who put down the huge sum of £65 for the Digital Deluxe version - ouch. It still baffles me how we aren’t allowed refunds for digital games as anyone could throw out any old rubbish, much like this, and just reap the rewards.

I could make a long review about the troubled launch and the reason why I don’t like the ‘always online’ DRM but I’m going to assume that most people know about this (it was even covered on BBC News), and don’t want to badger on too much about it because I found there were things much worse than this - the game itself.

I began a single player game not knowing exactly what to do but still thoroughly enjoyed seeing my city begin with just a few lower class homes to seeing them grow into large skyscrapers shooting up across the landscape. I enjoyed the first initial steps of learning how to play and zooming in and seeing my city from pedestrian angles with the nice tilt shift effect adding a whole new sense of achievement as to how I’d transformed this barren land. However, it’s only shortly after this that I saw my mistake - I was building a city with no real intention. You have to know what to specialise in whenever you make a new city, be it mining and trading one of the few materials, gambling, tourism, education or high tech industrial development, you have to go towards one of these else you’ll end up with a city with no purpose and just the regular high demand of every city (which you can’t cater for). Luckily you can select the ‘guide me’ button towards each specialisation which adds some challenges from sims and helps you towards what you are trying to achieve. Unfortunately though, a lot of different factors disrupt this pleasure of building a city and one of the main offenders is (yep, you guessed it) the size.

Every city is limited to a to a square box and towards the later developments of your city you’ll be desperately trying to squeeze in something like a water treatment plant as your water towers fail to provide enough water or a sewage treatment plant for the same reasons. It is possible to share resources with other cities in the region but that’s provided you have other cities or friends controlling those cities with enough extra resources, but sometimes it just plain doesn’t work and you buy water from another city only to find you still lack a considerate amount. This goes on to the next annoyance of this issue with size - unless you’re willing to start another city from scratch just to facilitate some of the needs of other cities, you’ll have to rely on other people in the region to help. Starting a city yourself may be ideal as you know exactly what to build but you have to go through all the usual beginning steps again and again. I thought about joining a game online so I could play in region already with a lot of player developed cities but this is impossible, and I mean it - absolutely impossible. The join game screen just lists a few full games, there is no way to search or filter any games which may have potential vacant cities. It’s completely broken and useless and causes a huge section of the experience to be unplayable. Another example of the hinderance of the space allocation came from when a friend and I were playing in a region. He was intending to build a college and a university in order for my city to get some educated sims which they badly needed, but he couldn’t play for a while so I was stuck with a full city badly needing some resources from him. All I could do was either wait for start a whole new city or just re create a city like his therefore wasting another city space. The same thing happened in another game we started as we had to abandon the previous region as my game save became corrupt (of all things). In this I had decided to create a city specialised in education and had built a University and College but these two buildings alone can take up a huge amount of space because of all of the attachments you can ‘plop’ on them. Due to this lack of space, my city badly needed residents as I couldn’t even hire teachers for my education buildings and they had to close and the same for my industrial buildings which needed educated sims but weren’t getting them. I thought perhaps of just bulldozing my industrial buildings (as I was often having to demolish all the abandoned buildings) but I needed the industrial buildings to make money for all my expensive education buildings. It’s a huge reactive problem which never settles and ultimately it always roots down the to fact that the city space is just far too small for the city’s needs.

Moving back to a more positive note, sharing resources can at times be beneficial and in a way each city can be unique because of this limited size. Hospitals for example are quite big and may not be needed in every city so if one player creates one or two in his/her region, then their specialised ambulances or ‘well-being vans’ can improve life in other cities. The same goes for large fire stations which can tackle chemical ‘hazmat’ fires and can aid other cities that don’t have the capability to handle (or room) to handle such events. This balance between cities can be good but it needs a group of friends working together, specialising in what they need and being online to update their cities as leaving a city half done doesn’t help anyone else other players can’t edit anything from within it.

One thing I was concerned about before purchasing this was whether Simcity had any point to it. By this I mean I don’t like just sandbox. Sandbox can be fun for practicing and just building huge and wonderful things but I also like an objective to my games and Simcity fails to provide this. The challenges and leaderboards are all empty and the only way you can feel any kind of achievement is through the occasional sim with a request or through the in-game achievements. I was really hoping for missions along with the general creating mode, something such as replacing a mayor or a crime infested city with low income and trying to turn around the profitis and clean up the streets. I would have loved to have done this in a single-player mode (which the game shies away from) but I know that if this feature were to ever be implemented it would be at a cost.  

I’m trying to find positive things to comment on but everything that is bad dominates the small amount of good in this game. The game does look very nice and interface and cute popping sounds and music are just the kind of things in my simulation games. Perhaps playing in a good group of active friends would make it much more enjoyable and perhaps we’ll see some life saving changes but as it stands Simcity is just beautiful to look at from a distance but deep down in its roots it’s corrupted and broken - kind of like some cities I know...

5/10

Update - EA have offered pre order customers the choice of one out of eight games for the troubled launch...

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)
Bejeweled 3
Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)
Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)
MOHW (Standard Edition)
NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)
Plants vs. Zombies
SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition