By: Sean Dibble
Maxis and SimCity are back after a long ten year hiatus.
Following suit with past games you build a city, and hope natural and non-natural
disasters don’t tear it down leaving you broke. This version of the game
brought new aspects to the design with better graphics the cities look even
more pretty then they did in the past. Though the maps are smaller you can do
more, trading with close cities in your region and building a great work to
help your city grow to monster levels. So let’s take a deeper look into this
new game.
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| And you thought you were safe from meteors |
You start the game off by choosing what region you would
like to build your city in you get to choose between 8 regions differing in
size and landscape. Once you have chosen that you must then name your region
and decide if you want it to be public or private, the only difference is with
private you must invite people to help you build your region, or keep it all to
yourself and build on every plot of land available your call. Also at this
screen is something called sandbox mode, which is for you creative type that
don’t want your buildings going BOOM. From here you select your plot of land,
and play the game.
The gameplay is great. The streets can go from dirt roads to
avenues with street rails on them. You can build a green city by adding a
recycling center and eventually getting rid of you upstart industry or you
could specialize in many different things like: Mining, Metalwork, Gambling, or
Tourism among others. You can decide not to educate your sims because honestly
who needs a education right I mean what’s the worst that could happen? Or if
you really wanna educate them build a department of education on your city hall
and get enough people going to school build yourself a university (which you
need if you wanna build anything at a great works location.) Another great
thing is that if you build any department in one city, it affects the whole
region so if you build a Department of Safety in Goldstown, Crapville will be
able to build hospitals, and Police Precincts right off the bat….well as long
as they have the money to build them.
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| Add Big Ben to turn your city into a London-inspired metropolis |
The gameplay is great, the music is a bit dull, and of
course, it’s a sim game; they speak Simolian and pay in Simolians but that’s no
big deal…just don’t think about having a full blown conversation with "Joe Billy
Bob" on the streets anytime soon. Another thing is keeping balance in your city Residential,
Commercial and Industry work hand in hand in building a great city, but if you
don’t balance the wealth class of all three you could run into a major problem
of ether having not enough workers or too many unemployed. It’s a delicate
balance but it makes the game that much more realistic. Throughout the game you will
be given missions; some for money and some just to make your sims happy, which is
VERY important, happier sims build better buildings, better buildings mean more
people and more people means….that’s right you guessed it: strippers…I mean
money... yeah money.
One big issue I have faced while playing this game is that
if yours happens to crash YOU LOSE EVERYTHING. The game saves on the cloud not
your hard drive and there is nothing you can do to fix this except post on a
forum your name your regions name and your cities name that was lost. To big of
a hassle for me I just built another one and didn’t bother reporting it.
Something cool that they did though was if you bought the
deluxe mode (only available on Origin not in stores), you received a few extras
like heroes and villians, French buildings, German buildings and British
buildings. Each one gives you landmarks and special buildings for example the
Germans will give you a better metro system, the French give you a better
police and the British you get double decker busses. Now if you didn’t buy
Deluxe you can still get these for around twenty dollars at the Origin store
and though it may not seem worth it, it does add a little something to
gameplay.
Good:
-Awesome Gameplay
-Beautiful Graphics
-Realistic
Bad:
Scully Rating: 8.5
out of 10