SimCity review

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.