Customer Reviews

City Life 2008 Edition

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Being a fan of city/empire building sims and considering SimCity 3000 was the first game I ever purchased I thought I'd give this one a try. If you enjoyed SimCity without all the heavy financial wrangling then this game is just right for you. The graphics are high end and very detailed. You can actually get right down to 'street level' and tour your city. In addition you also have a ability to 'tag' citizen and follow them in their lives throughout the game. I haven't really figured out the purpose of this but its a nice feature in any case.
You start out the game by choosing one of many landscapes that come with different 'difficulty' problems such as tourisim, road building, etc and place your city hall. From there you construct residences for your soon to come populace.
The interesting twist to this game is that there are five or six different socio-economic levels of citizens that will eventually populate your city. You start out with Blue Collar workers and Fringes. These citizens can only work specific jobs in factories or business available to you to build as well as utilities and services. By building certain services or businesses that employ the next level of citizenry (Suits, Radical Chics and Elites)your Blue Collar workers may advance to the Fringe level and the fringe to the Suit level, et al. Fail to provide and they can drop to the "Have Not" level. As poor as poor can be.
Your main job as city administrator is to advance and keep harmony in your city. Have Nots and Blue Collar folks get along just fine. Blue Collar and Fringe do not which leads to disruption in the neighborhoods and if allowed to go for too long, rioting.
Only persons who enjoy multi-tasking and constructing cities that run (almost) like clockwork would find this game enjoyable and satisfying. The game allows the player to follow scripted scenarios or play sandbox mode.
Your citizens pay taxes and certain businesses generate income. The higher class and more educated the employees the more money the business generates for your treasury. Naturally services like police, fire and the like drain your coffers.
Finally this game runs fine on my Dell XPS 2000 Gen 4 desktop. Make sure that you ensure your system requirements meet the specs or you'll be sorely disappointed.

I have been a Maxis/EA SimCity player for years. However, with their introduction of SimCity Societies and the new style of play I opted to give another game a try: City Life 2008. I'm glad I did. The graphics in the 2008 edition are very good with special features like reflections in the water that make it a little more special than the SimCity games.

I found the game itself to be very quick. Keep in my mind I have a very good machine (Dell Precision M4300 with 4GB RAM), but I suspect it will perform well on most machines. The one area where the game lags is during the installation and loading of the game. The installation seemed like it took forever! It also takes a minute or two to load each time you play it. Maybe the slow load time is where the game is loading into memory, etc and makes the game play more smooth and quick.

I loved the ability to zoom in to the street level and look around at the city. That's awesome! The zooming in and out is much quicker than any of the SimCity games. The ability to build roads and other items in a "freestyle" mode is also an excellent feature. Initially, the number of buildings seems adequate, but after playing the game for awhile you might wish it had more.

The "society" part of this game can be a learning curve for some users. You do have to build the city with all citizens/cultures in mind (blue collar, rich, etc). However, after a few tries you easily get the hang of it. I know SimCity Societies has the same concept, but I felt limited in the SimCity Societies game play. City Life 2008 offers more of the traditional "city building" that I am used to.

I recommend this game to anyone that wishes to get into the city simulation game world, as well as any previous SimCity user. The great graphics, added building features, and street level zooms put it above SimCity. Give it a try, you won't regret it!

what killed me was the amount of effort it took for me to even play this game. My graphics card was apparently not good enough,. Mind you, this computer is able to run professional 3D modeling software, professional music production software and pretty much any other game ever installed on it, including all of the SimCity games.

so I installed this and it simply would not run under any circumstance. I thought it was because of Vista but it turned out to be the card. So when Cities XL came out I finally broke down and bought one of the recommended cards for my system and installed it, at which point City Life 2008 began to work.

The intro and the menus for this game were beautiful. I was really happy when I opened it, I loved the industrial appearance of it and I was looking forward to playing the game.

I opened it up and could not have been more disappointed. It was so ugly and there were like 150 of the same little creepy person walking around, like a creepy zombie army. They congregate in groups, too, so you'll have a group of clones all just standing there facing a wall or something.

The actual texture mapping is palling. Like a plant is just a sphere with a flower map on it.

Anyway, it's really not a good looking game and I didn't get far enough into it to care about if it was "fun" to play because for me most of the fun of building a city is to have it look real, and look COOL and this game does not do either.

So what I don't get is why it took a video card upgrade to play a game that looks a fourth as good as SImCity and a tenth as good as Cities XL?

This is my first city building video game, and I loved it! I don't know how it compares to other games of the same type, but on its own it provides hours of fun as well as having to think through the complications of building a city and keeping citizens happy. It's just complex enough to keep me very entertained, while still being a great game for chilling out after a long day.
If you want to build up your city faster, you can type in ctrl+alt+c and "richgirl" or "midas" for a money cheat. It's more complicated without the money cheat though!
I'm using Windows Vista and it works well 75% of the time. I downloaded it and a message came up saying it didn't download properly, so I uninstalled and tried again, and again, and each time I got the message saying it didn't download. It plays just fine anyway, but occasionally the game will stop working and I'll lose it all, so I make sure to save frequently. Don't really know how to fix that!
My only other complaint is it's super annoying that the people are all clones of the same two people (one male, one female), and the graphics are fuzzy and could definitely use improvement, but for gameplay itself it's great!

I now have all three editions of City Life and as would be hoped, 2008 is the best of the lot. The problem is it's not so much better than World Edition that it was really worth buying again, other than the fact that I needed another copy for my wife. World Edition is a vast improvement over the original, while 2008 almost feels like a patch for World Edition. A few more buildings, some of them are mixed and matched a bit, and you've basically got the same game.

That said, if you haven't bought a version of City Life, this is the one to get, and it's well worth trying as an alternative to Sim City. As you may already know, you have a different kind of challenge in front of you as you build: 6 social classes that that will live in harmony with certain others but detest those who are vastly different. Keep them separate and live in peace; let them mingle and get ready for war. Huge sums of money can be made or lost in a short amount of time, and one small move can cause a large financial difference as well as huge changes in your population. It's tough to keep everything in line unless you plan very carefully.

The worst part of City Life is by far the load times. If you've got a big city going, you can practically make a cup of tea while waiting for it to load - and this is on a reasonably fast system. Thankfully once it's up it's pretty decent as long as you haven't made the video settings too high for your computer. Then you have to listen to the repetitive but nice music. Really that's all I have to complain about.

All in all I say pick 'er up unless you already own World Edition.

I tried this game out because it was cheap and I still don't think I played it enough to get my moneys worth. For me it installed and runs fine but usually when I play a sim game I loose all track of time, this game did not draw me in at all. I thought managing a city with a class war to manage would be interesting but in the end it was just drab. You can zoom to street level to watch your citizens but they all look the same and look like lego people.

It's not unplayable and I think if you wanted a game that aspires to be complex but is fairly simplistic (younger age group or new to micro managing games) this might be the way to go. There are named building to build, most other city games have generic "residential","Industrial" and "business" so that is a plus. It is weird to have 10 of the same kind of factory or store next to each other though.

If your reading reviews to make up your mind listen to the critics and get Sim City or Cities XL 2011.

After installing the game, the game will not play. I have tried this on 3 separate computers and have the same issues. I sent an e-mail to the distrubutor and the developer and neither have been able to assist me. i have been wondering if the disc that I received is a illegal copy and thats why it does not work. Botoom line, this purchase was a waste of money and my time. This was the first game i purchsed through Amazon, and it may be the last.

I was also unable to get this to run on not one but three (3) computers. It installed but when I tried to run it all I got was a window that said something about security and then shut down. I paid just over $30 for this at Target, huge waist of time and money. Last Game I will buy from this company.

While the buildings look good, this game demands the use of roads, while Sim City Societies and Sim City 4, both let you design your cities to use sidewalks and subways/underground logistics, w/out the NEED for roads.

Wouldnt know how fun it is considering the game wouldnt play on to differnt operating systems... Pretty much tells me why it was sold for so little! i hav bought 2 computer games from here and never got to play either for this reason, it will not happen again because i will not buy another computer game from here!!!