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      English
      Gamereactor
      reviews
      SimCity

      Sim City

      After a decade on the sidelines Sim City finally makes its return.

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      Sim City is huge. The game is of a scale and level of detail that is almost overwhelming at times. The amount of data and info about your town and its inhabitants constantly available is breathtaking. There is a bazillion things to take into consideration, and more possibilities than most players will ever get around to trying out in their time with the game. A region may consist of up to 16 cities, and you can be the mayor for all of them. It's enough to make your head spin.

      All the same Sim City manages to remain accessible. You are only ever presented with a small sample of the vast sea of data, and the data is presented on a strictly need to know basis. And even though the possibilities are almost endless, it is easy and elegant to carry them out. Click, click, click. Build, build, build. The game is simple and intuitive, and you always have an overview of what is needed in your city.

      SimCity

      If you have played the previous Sim City games, you have to brace yourself for some major upheaval. Roads are, both literally and figuratively, the glue that links everything in Sim City together. They are not just traffic arteries, but also work as power lines, water pipes, sewers and almost every other form of infrastructure. You do not assign land as residential, commercial or industrial zones, but instead you assign the sides of the roads. Buildings must be placed by a road, as it's the road intensity (how many cars it can hold) that determines whether small family houses eventually develop into skyscrapers or not.

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      But the biggest camel old Sim City players must prepare to swallow is the size of the map. The amount of space you have available for your city is limited, to put it mildly, compared to the predecessors. In short, it can be filled out in an afternoon with plenty of time to spare. No, you can not recreate New York in the new Sim City, not without downscaling it something silly.

      To be honest it feels a little cramped when you first start experiencing these space issues. If you just build your heart out with zones and service buildings, such as hospitals, schools, police stations etc., it can feel as if you've run out of space before you have really get going.

      SimCity

      But as I said, it is possible to control up to 16 cities depending on which region you have chosen, and that's the whole point. Varying natural resources and terrain makes the different city locations suitable for different specialties. One location is perhaps an obvious location for extraction of raw materials and heavy industry, while another one is better suited to a focus on education or tourism. One city cannot satisfy every need.

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      The game encourages specialisation and coordination between your cities. Sims commute both for education and work, and excess capacity in everything from medical care to waste disposal can be sold to neighboring towns.

      And this is where the real challenge in Sim City lies. The narrow framework means that if you want to reach the top, you need to have a clear plan from the beginning, and need to think about the very long term. Essentially you should have a good idea of what your city center should look like and where it should be before you draw the first road. If you just build haphazardly, you easily end up with traffic problems that will be very difficult to solve.

      SimCity

      In my first city I decided to focus on tourism, but before I had built my (rather expensive) convention center, which was supposed to be the first step on the road to becoming tourist magnet, I had almost filled the map. And the only place I could find room for it was at the opposite end of the entry road to my city, far away from both the railway and tram connections. As a result traffic chaos ensued.

      The emphasis on specialisation places a much higher demand on efficiency than a sandbox game normally would do, while the region system and neighboring towns mean that you must have a master plan and grasp of the bigger picture: always minding the small and large scale issues at the same time.

      Maybe it sounds more like a chore than fun, but the fact remains that Sim City is a joy to play. The reason it is so easy to lose track and paint yourself into a corner, is simply that it is so entertaining to just draw roads and fill in the zones and buildings. An industrial zone here, an avenue here. Parts of the city have water shortages, schools should be expanded. And shouldn't I just make a harbour here? It all runs like a well-oiled machine.

      And the amount of detail in the simulation is as simply staggering. Property value and population density is displayed with elegant graphs directly in the game world. You can zoom in on each Sim and see what they're doing, where they comes from, where they're going. Small thought bubbles pop up around the city, and there's talk about the joy of being able to take a shower now that people have water, or on the flip side there's talk of stomach illness and disease.

      SimCity

      Yet everything's presented in the humorous style that has been synonymous with Sim games since Sim City 2000. The loading screen speaks about adjusting llama frequencies and petting goats. A large T-Rex-like monster can invade the city and destroy houses and buildings, working its way up to eating most of the contents of your garbage dump.

      Residents talk about searching the web for "what to do in case of fire" while their house burns to the ground. A festive man offers 50,000 Simoleons if he is allowed to fire a bunch of fireworks (with the disclaimer that the fireworks will cause fires in the city). Companies have names like Taco Fillings Inc and The Doughnut Bag Factory.

      If you're not in the mood for all the seriousness of city planning and government and unlocking things, you can instead turn to sandbox mode. Here you get a blank slate of land, 1 million Simoleons to build with, and a fully unlocked tech tree. You aren't completely free to do as you please, as you can quickly build your way to a thunderous deficit, but with a some skill you can quickly lay the foundation of a super city.

      SimCity

      And then there's integration with Origin. Sim City requires a network connection to play, and if you lose the connection to Origin, you are almost immediately kicked out of the game. Maybe the circumstances were a little extraordinary, because we were playing non-final version of the game, but a few times during our time with Sim City we got the boot, and were relegated to staring at an uncooperative Origin client. This hopefully gets rectified before launch, because there are few things more provocative than being kept from enjoying your game due to server problems.

      Sim City is an exceptionally well-designed and well presented pleasure where everything runs like clockwork. You will be immersed in the game right from the start, and everything is so intuitively put together that you're never in doubt about what to do and what your options are. It is an ambitious game - but I would have liked Maxis to have aimed just a little bit higher, and made the game slightly larger, because there is a slight feeling of unfulfilled potential. Even though the rest of the package is terrific.

      HQ
      08 Gamereactor UK
      8 / 10
      +
      + Incredibly captivating gameplay. + Brilliant presentation. + Great overview in spite of massive amount information. + Accessible.
      -
      - Comes across as a bit narrow. - Origin client is cause for some concern.
      overall score
      is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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      "After a decade on the sidelines Sim City finally makes its return."



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