SimCity review

After many years of waiting, SimCity has finally returned. You could tell how anticipated this launch was by the size of the backlash when it went wrong, with overloaded servers preventing players from playing and a howl of outrage on gaming forums that even made it to national newspapers.

All that seemed to have cleared up by the time of writing. The only annoying remnants are that the game remains resolutely online-only and that seems to mean it updates almost every time we play; despite being perfectly playable on a fairly modest laptop, the online requirement means we can’t play it on the go.

BEING BORIS

For those unfamiliar with the long-running series, SimCity puts you in the shoes of a town mayor. Your job isn’t to build every building, but rather act as city planner extraordinaire. You place the roads, zone areas for residential, commercial or industrial buildings, and provide services such as power, water, sewage, medical care, mass transit and education – as well as being the principal driver of commerce. Despite the default American setting, SimCity is more like a socialist state than anything. The core game mechanics of building a city will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the previous incarnations, but the added regions and online play shake things up dramatically.

Your powers are far reaching, making you more god than mayor

Regions vary in size, and contain multiple city sites – from two to sixteen. The idea is that you play online, just with friends in a shared game or with strangers on a public region – though you can play alone if you prefer in a private region. Having chosen a region map, you choose some unclaimed laund and start building your city.

Each region contains a number of set city sites, with strict borders on where you can build – this region has just two

The city sites are strictly limited by square borders, which often seem rather arbitrary in relation to the terrain. You can only build within the borders, leaving large parts of the region undeveloped. Pre-built highways and railways run between the cities, plus ships and planes move about – stopping off if you have the right facilities to receive them. You can’t change these elements, just connect to them.

The reason for the small city spaces soon becomes clear; you simply can’t fit everything you’d really want in a single city. Our first city became horribly clogged as we tried to fit all the various utilities, educational establishments and other bits we wanted. We soon realised that we had to take control of a second city in the region in order to make space for a large sewage plant, which then generated an income for dealing with the first cities excess filth.

Our first city was quickly clogged-up by our over ambitious plans …

… so we left more space in our second one by sharing key services between our two cities

This mechanic works for almost every facet of the game. You can assist your neighbours with fire or medical cover, sell them power, or sell them oil to power their own plants. Your citizens may even commute to another city for work or education.

Given that there are many competitive strategy games out there, SimCity’s gentle and cooperative nature comes as a lovely change of pace. However, it’s not that simple as you’ll soon find yourself wanting to get one up on your neighbours, plus there are challenges you can enter as a region for in-game rewards.

SIM-MERING TENSIONS

While past games simulated everything on a high level and drew graphics to represent the results, the new SimCity simulates the day-to-day lives of your citizens and then events occur based on their actions. Instead of simulating where a traffic jam is most likely to occur for example, traffic jams are now spontaneous, based on the amount of cars trying to move along any given road.

Traffic jams are now properly simulated, so it’s best to put in wider avenues in your initial design

The roads now act as the backbone of all services, so power, water and sewage all flow along them. Nothing can be built unless it is attached to a road, even if it’s only a dirt track. Speaking of which, you can now upgrade that track after building it into various levels of roads, each capable of handling more traffic at higher speeds.

Here we’ve just added a Department of Education to our city hall, allowing us to build a university and boost high-tech industry

Buildings such as fire stations, schools, hospitals and even the city hall can also be upgraded. Instead of having to build multiple schools all over your town, you can simply upgrade one with more classrooms and more bus garages. The town hall can add departments such as Transport or Tourism, allowing access to superior buildings. You can specialise each mini city for a particular task, to ensure that they all have individual character.

PRETTY CITY

All of this is beautifully presented, with gorgeous cityscapes, lovingly lit, that are bustling with life. Cars whizz about, citizens go about their business and leisure. There’s a huge variety of buildings on offer, from picturesque picket-fence houses to high-tech commercial skyscrapers and smoke-belching industrial monstrosities. Even the presentation of dry information looks great with wealth graphs and pollution maps overlaid on a monochrome rendering of your city.

Zoom in and you can get information on every building and person

One downside is that everything looks American, and if you want a more European look you’ll have to pay £20 for the Deluxe Digital Edition, which includes a European building set, landmarks and transportation options to match.

GOING DOWNTOWN

At first we felt that the game had been limited purely for the purpose of encouraging online play, leaving solo city builders out in the wilds. However, the limited space actually fired our creativity, and the fact you can quickly fill each city space gives you motivation to come back and try something else with the next one.

We do miss building cities in unlikely places, as the choice of city plots is rather conservative, despite the maps having some pretty rugged terrain. We also missed the old scenarios, such as rebuilding Tokyo after a monster attack, or regenerating Detroit. In fact, SimCity seems to be occurring in a bubble of growth unrecognisable in our current economic climate.

Despite all that though, there’s a great game in here, and one that city building fans will relish. We are a little concerned that a game priced at £35 should instantly have downloadable content costing £20. However, there’s easily enough here to justify the initial outlay – just be careful not to get too jealous when you spy your neighbour’s expensive euro-styled architecture.