by Few franchises stir the imagination and the awe of gamers quite like Maxis’ SimCity. Both educational and fun, it was the first world builder video game that allowed the player unrivaled abilities to play god—even back in 1989 in your school’s computer lab, you could turn your city into a sprawling metropolis or burn it to ash. From this humble beginning came iconic titles like SimCopter, SimCity 2000, and the juggernaut Sims franchise. This latest iteration, titled simply SimCity, is both the sequel to SimCity 4 and a reboot of the franchise. While the new SimCity is in many ways more approachable and fun than ever, the move to multiplayer gameplay created severe gameplay issues, creating a frustrating and at times broken game.
In SimCity, your metropolis has never looked so clean, crisp, and vibrant. The new engine creates unrivaled detail in the game world, allowing players to see individual trucks, sims, and street corners. The little digital ant farm you’ve created is also full of many choices, from how to plan your cities’ roads to what industries you specialize in (gambling, technology, etc.), how you develop utilities, and even some microscopic details like tax rates for the different classes of people who dwell in your fictional city. Thanks to the amazing detail, choice, and control, you really do feel godlike, for my money—more so than even in games like Civilization or Black & White.
Throughout the history of SimCity, Maxis kept expanding on the number of aspects of your city you needed to track, moving beyond power and water to things like waste, pollution, and trash—and as a result, the interface became more and more unwieldy. In the new SimCity, Maxis has done an admirable job of streamlining the interface, using a great deal of the trappings of the Sims 3. You’ll have goals such as “Plop a Community College” and “Get 1000 students in a day” that can result in bonus simoleons and needed direction. The result is a game that never feels overwhelming despite being very, very complex.
My experience with the launch was much smoother than some others’ in the press, mainly owing to the timing of my review. I pulled double-duty and chose to tackle (wisely, it turns out) Bioshock Infinite first so I didn’t get to SimCity until a few days later. Even then, SimCity did crash during my initial tutorial run and I had some major slowdown issues for the first day. I did not, as some have reported, have difficulty putting the game on Cheetah mode (the fastest mode). If you’re reading this review, I can assure you that launch period issues should no longer affect you, so I’m not one of those reviewers who is dinging the game’s rating based on launch issues.
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