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412 of 416 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Simcity, but somewhat entertaining nonetheless, November 15, 2007
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
If you're reading this, the odds are that you have some basic understanding of the premise of this game and already understand that it is NOT in line with the historic Simcity franchise. It's meant to be more of a hybrid between The Sims and Simcity.
In keeping with this, many of the micromanagement aspects of Simcity have been completely removed, primarily in the infrastructure department (transportation and power are very basic and water/waste have been completely removed). There are no budgets, ordinances, or city advisors. Cash is generated on a straight line relationship to buildings that produce it. Zoning is gone, as is the idea of area of effect coverage by certain buildings.
The new concept in Societies is social energy which comes in 6 main flavors - Authority, Prosperity, Creativity, Knowledge, Productivity and Spirituality. The amount of each energy in each city is defined by the types of buildings you place. For example, an Observatory increases Knowledge, a Wall Mural increases Creativity, you get the idea. Unfortunately, some buildings also consume social energy so you need a certain reservoir of a given type for some buildings to function. Unfortunately, the correlation between which buildings produce and consume is, as far as I can tell, arbitrary. For example, a Stone Church acutally consumes spirituality but a Religious Bookstore produces it. The only way to know is to look at each building individually.
As you overbalance towards one of the social energies, your city gradually begins to thematically reflect the energy. This is easily done, as you tend to unlock new buildings which increase a given energy as you build more structures which produce/consume it. In other words, if you start heavy on police stations, jails, courts, and other government type buildings, your Authority energy starts spiking and unlocks things like the Ministry of Thought, Secret Police and the Propaganda Center. Your city, in turn, becomes more Orwellian in nature - even the music changes to match the mood. The buildings, streets, even the lighting actually change as well the further you push it (I went with an authority theme in my first city and named it, appropriately, Paranoia).
This last dynamic is really the reason to play the game. There really are a lot of fun concepts you can build - a frontier town (complete with horse and buggy instead of cars) a college town (complete with dorms and frat houses), even a haunted town. (There is a "hidden" societal energy for Haunted). The visual represenation of the societal energies is what makes the game tick and makes you want to try different city types.
Unfortunately, the down side is that there is almost no structure to the game. There are no missions, scenarios, or even goals. Unlocking more structures and a few trophies is about it. This means that gameplay gets a bit repetitive. I've sunk about 20 hours into the game at this point and it's already getting a bit redundant - at least until a city really begins to hum. There is also minimal challenge to the game. In Simcity, it was fairly easy to get off on the wrong foot by overdeveloping, overexpanding, or failing to plan things out. Dealing with the issues this caused was (and remains) one of the alluring things about the game. Socities, by contrast, is much more forgiving. I would go so far as to say it is probably impossible to "fail" at building your city and there is very little emotional/fun payoff for designing your city particularly well. It's more just to see what it looks like, and then moving on.
Controls are pretty easy to use and intuitive. There are simple sorting options for the various energies to get you right to what you want. My main beef is that the road system is somewhat clumsy and the building selection screen doesn't give you a size "footprint" making it annoying to build something as simple as a city block. Also, as mentioned above, there is no inutitive way to know what buldings consume/produce energy other than looking at them individually.
Finally, the game is definitely a system hog (although my understanding is the patch currently available is supposed to help with that). My 2.75 GHZ CPU, Dual SLI Nvidia 8800 GTXs, and 4 GB ram had severe stuttering on the high resolution. However, the game still looks great on medium/high resolution settings and lets you zoom in as far as you could wish. The sounds/music are Sims-esque, but quite good.
I'd rate this one at about a 5 out of 10. It's fairly simple to plug in and play, although some of the mechanics "under the hood" are hard to understand. It's definitely NOT Simcity, but I give EA/Tilted Mill credit for at least trying something different in this era of highly repetitive game styles/types (Another WWII game? Sure! We can make it an FPS and call it Medal of the Call of Opposing Fronts 6!) Had they taken the time to give it a bit more structure, and actually not dumbed it down quite as much, it would be a much better and compelling game. If you're a fan of the Sims, I'd say go get it now - you'll probably feel like it's worth the money. For fans of Simcity or gamers with a passing interest, I'd wait a few months for the price to drop on it.
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92 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful but full of bugs and problems, November 22, 2007
Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars
It is unfortunate that the Sim City franchise has put out a product that is so full of bugs that many users are unable to play the game at all. The Sim City forums are full of reports of technical problems, ranging from system crashes, to memory leaks.
Here are some things to be aware of if you have the game or are considering it:
1. there is already a patch available from EA, however, this patch does NOT resolve any of the reported crashes or memory leaks
2. there are a myriad of bugs, one of which is incredibly silly - if you use a particular type of road (the most common one) the game basically grinds to a halt, but if you always use county roads (a dirt road), the panning/scrolling is as normal
3. there is a mod available which unlocks some features and enhances game play, but again, crashes and memory leaks abound
4. if you have an ATI video card, there is a known issue with the latest THREE versions of the ati catalyst driver and this game - you will have to revert to a version that is approximately 4 versions old in order to maintain any level of game stability
That's enough for the technical issues, let's talk about game play.
The game is beautiful, and highly adaptive. You can finally play in a "free-for-all" mode that gives you unlimited money and basically lets you build the city of your dreams - you had to use a cheat to do this in previous sim games. The graphics are splendid and you can customize the level of detail for just about any aspect of the game, but keep in mind the higher detail, the slower the play, even on a fast computer. Adaptive means that depending upon the type of buildings you most often build, the "environment" will adapt and change, including the music and sim behaviour. This part is VERY cool.
Another downside that a lot of people are talking about is that there is really not a point to the game. You basically have to balance the types of buildings you build, and the sources of societal pleasure, like creativity, authority, productivity. What this really means is that you need to build houses, workplaces, decorations and venues for your sims, and each one has associated positive or negative points in those societal pleasures. As long as you build a balance of buildings, you're basically set. There is no challenge to the game in that regard, especially if you're playing in unlimited money mode, or free-for-all mode.
There are no options for things such as highways and trains in this game, because that's not the point. You get several types of roads, bus stations and subway stations (but no subway option - you just build the station and it's created for you). There are no water items to build (no pumps, towers, pipes), and you can plop your power plant anywhere on the map - no worry about connecting it anywhere, there are no power lines and it doesn't seem to matter where you put it as long as it exists.
Education? Only if you need to balance out your societal points, otherwise people don't seem to care about education one way or another. You can build some clinics to keep people healthy and you can build a police station or fire station if you want to, but unless you unleash a disaster, I've never needed them unless I'm balancing points.
The variety of buildings you can build, from houses to venues is quite diverse, and they have added cool concepts like stores that your population can buy products from to increase their happiness. But that happiness wears off after a while and they need more to buy. Again, just make sure you have enough venues for your sims and they take care of the rest. There's no micromanagement needed.
The game does continue to evolve as you play. Bridges go from uncovered to covered as your society ages, and other minor things change too.
All in all, the game has frustrated me due to the buggy nature. I can only play for about 30 minutes at a time before the memory leaks completely consume my computer. The program does not even exit cleanly, consuming over 400MB RAM even after the program has closed. (All known and reported issues)
My recommendation is to stick with your SimCity3000 or my personal favourite, SimCity 4, at least until a few more patches come out from EA to fix the game play and performance. It's not worth the money at this point.
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38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horribly Unstable, November 22, 2007
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
This game is NOT SimCity. It has little depth, almost no problem solving, and nothing that can't be fixed by spending money and replacing buildings. Money just rolls in once your city reaches critical mass, and that's not hard to do either. If you want a challenge in this game, you'll have to create it yourself by deliberately throwing in crime, pollution, and situations that provoke sims in to going 'rogue'.
But the graphics are awesome. The city's roads and buildings take on the character of certain archetypes (cyberpunk, authoritarian, romantic, fun, contemplative, etc) as you push certain societal energies. This makes playing the game and watching the evolution of your city a lot of fun.
However, the energies themselves affect only buildings. Sims are sims in this game and never act any different depending on what you do. They get happy and unhappy just the same. For all it's talk about creating your own society, this game doesn't seem to realize that the society is the people. Since none of what you do affects the people much at all the game comes across as rather hollow and superficial.
If you'd like to create a city from a simple artistic point of view, this game is for you. You've got total control over which building goes where. Street placement is limited to 90 degree angles though and there's only 2 kinds of streets (the paved one does change according to what energies your city uses, and these different types have already been unlocked by at least one mod). If you are looking to indulge your creativity in building a beautiful city with an interesting layout, this game will let you do just that.
But wait for another patch. This thing crashes frequently. I can get up to 2hrs of playtime before it crashes depending on how large my city is and how much I do. Often it crashes after 30 min on small to medium cities. I haven't gotten anywhere close to filling up the map. The EA SCS boards are filled with people who have similar, if not worse problems. (There is an autosave feature. I have it set to save every 5 min. But really, who wants to play a game that continually crashes?)
SCS is a game that's more geared towards the casual gaming market. That's ok (except for the hardcore SimCity4 fans who were looking for an update on a classic). I could get into SCS and lose myself for several hours if it was stable and would run for several hours reliably. I'd give it a 3/5 on the fun scale. But I have to take off 2 stars for instability. I have Vista 64 and my computer specs far exceed the minimum. There's no excuse, in my opinion, for releasing a game that obviously wasn't beta tested enough. I have to assume EA was trying to cash in on the Christmas buying season since they well knew they weren't going to get many SimCity fans sold on SCS.
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