Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2013
After putting in about 70 hours into SimCity (2013), I can honestly say that the game is fatally flawed. We are all aware of the catastrophe that is the ongoing server issues, and the cheating that EA did to fool us into thinking the sims were "individuals" with their own lives. But beyond the gimmicks and the failure to anticipate the huge server traffic on launch day, the game fails to deliver, it passes itself off as a complex simulator of an actual city, but in the end, it is simply clunky, illogical, and frustrating. I have distilled the problems down into several basic issues that make it almost impossible to enjoy this game.
The first issue is road construction. The avenues are extremely expensive to construct in the beginning of the game, so one avoids it. But as the game progresses, Avenues are the only viable means of dealing with the heavy traffic of an expanding city (which is almost impossible to deal with in any event). Unfortunately, you are unable to upgrade high density streets into avenues, leaving you with the task of destroying streets to replace them with avenues. As you go through this painful exercise, you watch your established buildings crumble (as you demolish the roads, the buildings go too), along with them your revenue goes into freefall, the sims become angry, and it takes several hours in game time to recover from the growing pains.
The roads themselves are clunky beasts. Forget about laying road right next to a building, if you want it snug, you will have to destroy the building, place the road, then hope the area is repopulated. The game simply will not allow you to lay roads close to buildings. In Simcity 4, yes you had to destroy and replace as well, but the costs were not so steep–you could economically destroy and rebuild/redesign without worrying about bankruptcy. In Simcity 2013, unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars saved up, you will likely come to the edge of oblivion with your city as you replace and rebuild to expand.
Then there is laying road on mountainsides. This is nearly impossible, you will lay a length of road and come close to your connecting road only to find that the game says you will be unable to connect the roads due to "angles" or "curves" or "too steep" or whatever. So then you have to demolish what you built, try again, and likely be forced to demolish and do trial and error over and over again. Beyond frustrating, this is extremely expensive and will likely bankrupt your city. The alternative is not to lay road, but if you are in a mountainous map, you need the roads so you can develop. The perfect illustration of this is in the Hickory Ridge map on the Titan Gorge region--you will notice that on almost every single game you open, that particular area is always either abandoned (because it sucks and people get frustrated), or it is the only open area on the map--because nobody wants to play it.
The second big issue is money. Money rolls in far too slow, especially in the beginning of the game, meanwhile, buildings and infrastructure are very expensive. This leads to a lot of sitting around and waiting for money to come into the city coffers. The game, in large part, is a sitting around bore-fest, waiting for enough money to roll in so you can finally expand your little city. This appears to be a way for Maxis/EA to keep people from filling out their tiny maps so quickly, as there was a lot of complaints about the maps being far too small. But this is not the right solution–to artificially restrict expansion by making up-front costs very steep. And if you get jumpy and start blowing through money, well, you go bankrupt and your city is ruined. The most annoying part about all this is that at some point, you are going to get bored and you are going to just jump the gun and spend money--and whenever you do that, you can kiss your city goodbye.
This leads into the third big issue, which is game saving. For some reason, you are not allowed to save your game. So if you decide that half way through you want to experiment, if your experiment fails, your city will likely fall faster than Detroit. Alternatively, if things are going well in your city, but you suddenly get a big earthquake, or worse, a meteor shower (which always has the uncanny result of targeting the number 1 profit making center of your city, thus creating major damage far beyond a few destroyed/burning buildings), you will lose your town if it is a particularly bad disaster--poof, gone!
This is extremely frustrating because your towns take a long time to build and take a lot of patience, but one wrong move, one bad disaster, and it's all over--no saves, no do-overs, your city is just a wasteland and your game is over--time to start over with another city.
The fourth big issue is finding an open game. Since there are no filters right now and there are many abandoned cities you can't claim (if the city was created with the "deluxe" package and you don't have the deluxe, you can't claim it), or there are simply no open games. So you have to scroll down to the bottom of the long list of full games, then click "load more results," which then of course automatically re-scrolls the list all the way to the top and so you have to scroll back down through all the games you've already scrolled through just to scroll through the ones at the bottom to see they are full too, and repeat the process by clicking "load more results." In some instances, I've scrolled through games for 30 minutes frustratingly looking for an open game. And why the hell would I want to see all the full games in the first place when I am trying to join a game, EA?
Many at this point may be pointing out: well simply start your own game. The problem is in order to find your new game to join, other players will have to scroll through the long list of full/wasteland cities, unless you have some game “friends.” So at the end of the day, you end up playing the map by yourself. Now playing single player is a great idea, but the game is set up in such a way that playing by yourself is boring--there is no dynamic to the game. Also, you then have to pay to upgrade every single item yourself--you can't rely on someone else in the region to plop a department of transportation so you could plop a utilities instead. You instead have to fund and plop everything yourself, which is maddening given the costs and the inability to quickly make money. The game is also designed to force you to share resources–if you have a low-water map, you likely have a lot of mining and can buy extra waters from others, but if there are no others playing, then there is nobody to buy water from and your city drys out.
Some may then suggest that sandbox is a good alternative. Sandbox mode allows you to have unlimited resources and upgrades. The problem is many of the buildings you plop will do so fully upgraded--like the Town Hall or Oil HQ. This then causes you to have buildings in your city that simply are not compatibles with your city size and make it impossible for you to have a balanced budget in sandbox mode. For example, you do not need a fully-upgraded Oil HQ when you have one oil well running, or a level 7 city hall when you have only 500 residents in your city. Sandbox, in essence, just turns into a plop-fest where you just drop items to see what they are and what they do, because you know there is no way to grow a sustainable city in sandbox.
The fifth issue--and to me it is a deal-breaker--is the sloppy, slow, stupid, and frustrating AI that controls emergency services. There is nothing like watching three buildings burn to the ground while your fire truck never leaves the station. There is nothing like having 5 fire trucks respond to one fire only to have them all waiting at a red light while the building burns down! What fire truck have you ever seen with red lights flashing and horn honking and sitting at a traffic signal??? It is mind boggling that these buffoons at EA would take away control of emergency services from the player (as we always could control them in prior Sim City games), and then make them largely useless. Buildings burn, criminals get away as your patrol cars drive aimlessly in circles, never going "code 3" to respond, and letting the criminals simply waltz away. People die in their homes as your ambulances race in the wrong direction, go down the wrong street, or never make it back to the hospital/clinic.
The emergency services vehicles will also want to always drive down to the end of the street, turn around, and then head back up the street so they are on the right side of the road. Again, what emergency response department does this?? Could you imagine a police car responding to a burglary but first obeying the red/green lights all the way to the scene, then driving to the end of the street to flip a street-legal u-turn??? None, and for a game that is suppose to be such a great simulation, it should do the same thing--just drive to the scene and stop, we don't care what side of the road you stop on!
There is also the problem of emergency responders sitting in traffic with their lights on--the civilian vehicles don't pull to the right or otherwise make way (like they do in real life), they simply sit in the gridlock while the crime goes on, the building burns, the person dies of whatever illness.
This seems like minor stuff, but when you spend 50-60% of your entire game budget on this stuff only to watch it fail miserably, it is extremely frustrating and nearly ruins the game. Why should I spend so many hours and work so carefully with my money in the game when the AI can't even get a fire truck to a fire.
Then there are of course the utility vehicles--buses, school buses, trash trucks, etc. These are also extremely expensive items, but they have the driving pattern of an Alzheimer's patient, aimlessly driving up and down one street or around and around in circles while your city population becomes upset and frustrated and your game is negatively impacted. Either allow players to set the course for these vehicles or make them work right--otherwise, what's the point?
The sixth issue is crime. I suppose it is sort of like real life, but in some cities you create, you can have a veritable police state and still have an insane crime problem--it doesn't matter how many stations, patrol cars, helicopters, etc., you have, if the game decides you have a crime problem city, you will just have to live with it. Then there is the issue of other players--if they have a crime problem because they don't pay for police, you can sit back and watch their criminals flood into your town, and there is nothing you can do about it. Imagine creating a "perfect" city only to have someone move in next door that decides just to screw around and cause a lot of crime--well, you're screwed too.
The seventh issue is trash. Why is it that a giant city like Los Angeles can have 4-5 trash dumps, but a city of 100k in Sim City also needs a minimum of 2-3 trash dumps, fully expanded with trucks and dump sites. The garbage requirements for this game are just whacky and stupid--and since dumps piss off a lot of sims, create a lot of pollution, are expensive, and decrease land value, they are extremely difficult to manage.
The eighth issue is fires. Why is it that in a city of 3,000 sims, I have 7 fires going on at one time? The strange thing is a city this size can only really financially sustain one station with one truck--but the game doesn't care, your city will burn. Now think about real life a city of 5,000 in the US would have what, one fire truck and probably only a volunteer fire department? So why is it I need five decked out trucks for a tiny game city--that can't even afford that much equipment? It makes no sense.
These are just the basic issues, as the game progresses, the issues only get more complex, funky, and stupefying, and as your city grows and you feel like you are finally getting a handle on things, there is nothing worse then some unexpected financial, disaster, services, or other problem arising that utterly devastates all the hard un-savable progress you've made.
It is as if EA/Maxis simply created a game engine and never checked to see if it would actually work properly. Things happen that just shouldn't happen as your city suffers from shoddy AI, half-baked game options, and backwards/counter-intuitive automation. The game simply loses all of its luster and, most importantly, its fun.
This is not a fun game to play. It was a great idea, and had a lot of potential, but instead of seeing this game through, it seems a turd was simply dropped on customers. There also was a lot of false advertising. This game was pushed as "realistic" and as "smart" and as "close as you can get to being a real mayor." The beta itself was a giant lie--it seems the only reason game play was restricted to an hour is because Maxis knew that after an hour of game play, the whole thing just falls apart into a big hot mess of digital nothingness.
I would say if you love city simulators, stick with simcity 4, and don't bother with this mess of a game. Perhaps after a dozen patches this game will be worth it, but right now, it's just junk.