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SimCity - Standard Edition [Download]

SimCity - Standard Edition [Download]

byElectronic Arts
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Top positive review

All positive reviews›
Brandon Staggs
4.0 out of 5 starsStill an excellent game
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2013
I lucked out and happened to be one of the ones who didn't have any server issues at launch. Was able to download and play within about 20 mins. Was on and playing for over 3 hours with no connection issues after that. As always with me, would rather point out the cons and finish up with the pros.

Cons
1) City Size. While I understand why they did this, it's still frustrating on many levels. The major frustration comes from if you don't realize the true limitations you try to do everything in one city and end up fighting traffic, budget deficit issues, and the never ending demand of RCI. Instead, the concept of this game is to not have a single giant city but instead to have several smaller specialized ones. When you realize this and you plan accordingly, your regions really prosper.

2) City Safety. No matter how many buildings you have and even if you max them out, there's never enough to go around or you're stymied by traffic. In one of my cities, I have over 60 police cars, 4 detective vans, and 4 crime prevention vans and yet there's still too much crime. It wasn't until I looked closer at the entrance to the city that I realized the issue was:

3) Traffic. I've watched videos, read write-ups, and tried out many different road lay outs but I still can't get around the massive rush hour traffic that just about shuts all my cities down. In my tourism city I have 2 train stations, a port with a cruise line, over 25 street cars and over 30 buses and I can't keep up with the traffic. I try to route traffic specifically by park & go's and bus stops, I try and route local sims to business instead of into major throughways, and I try to keep the traffic from the trains and port routing to the tourism sites but none of it helps. Don't even get me started on by oil/ore/coal cities.

4) AI. Now, I'm sure they'll fix this eventually, and a lot of different reviews (amateur and professional alike) have hit on this already, but the AI is stupid in this game. Pathing, city service deployment, transportation, you name it. You have 3 T-intersections in an area completely clogged up but 2 blocks up and over there's 3 cars total passing through the entire road line. Why wouldn't they reroute the traffic jam to utilize the open roads? 3 cop cars, 2 fire trucks and 2 ambulances coming up behind you, don't pull over to the side and let them by or anything, just flip 'em off and continue waiting in the gridlock. I mean really, why would you not program certain vehicles to have a higher priority on the roads or to have the other cars move to the side for emergency vehicles. Half my city is burning because a) my fire trucks decided to go through downtown at rush hour instead of taking the alternate path and b) they're stuck in rush hour because no one lets them by.

Pros
1) Addicting. This type of game is how I wish all games were. It's addicting enough to keep you involved for hours upon hours while playing and you can work on city upgrade plans in the back of your mind while not playing. But the level of addiction isn't so bad as it's all you want to do. I can easily drop 2-3 hours in an evening and it flies by, but once I walk away I don't have any overwhelming urge to run back to it. Mind you this is a personal Pro because user experiences will vary, but for me it's what makes it an ideal game.

2) Graphics. While it's a simple city-planning style game, I really love the flow and look of the graphics. Realistic enough to leave an awe inspiring feelings of accomplishment as your city grows into a sprawling metropolis but not so much that you take the game overly serious. It's beautiful and the depth of overall visuals are extremely pleasing. Everything from the plans flying overhead (even if you don't have airports yet in your region), to the random boats passing by through your water ways, to the changing time of day (even if it sometimes is to dark at night) is just satisfying. It's nice to play a game that's still a game and not focusing on hyper-realism (graphics wise).

3) Regions. While I initially disliked the city sizes, once I realized the possibilities of creating a fully functioning region I actually started getting pretty excited about the possibilities. It takes some getting used to, planning out the individual cities to work in tandem with each other is really a fun and new take on for Sim City. Before you had a large area (probably the same size as a region) to build a multi-purpose city that involved everything, here you have smaller cities that add up to make the whole region. Similar to how you have a county with smaller city/towns that make it up and each city/town adds different things to the overall county. I'd really like to see at some point in the games future where they actually interconnect Regions with planes/boats/trains and truly turn the game from a single city/region responsibility to a true world environment.

4) Overall game play. I cannot knock on how they've managed to pull everything together on this game. Given, the last SimCity I played actively was 3000 so I'm not sure of how 4 played, but I really love the smooth game play implementation of this iteration. Takes a few failed cities/regions to realize the major changes, but once you do it really is a good game and helps add to and build up the SimCity legacy. The menus are extremely easy to navigate and find. The advisors give pretty decent advice even if they are redundant or obvious.

5) Music! I'm a music nut, in my opinion music is the true window into the soul. The sound track (when it works) is really amazing and even listening to it for over 4 hours still sounds fresh. I also like how it changes depending on your zoom level. Just overall amazing. As for the "when it works" comment, I've found that once the city hits a certain size or there's just so much going on in the city the sound will die out or glitch on a specific sound. Like if you clicked on your Police Dept while sirens were going off in the background and traffic noise was being introduced ontop of whatever the engine handling all of that gets over loaded and just loops those noises over and over again until you exit out and reload. Rather annoying.

In summary, despite the epic launch day issues (even though I didn't experience them), the DRM/Always on requirement, and the occasional sound glitch, the game is still fun and enjoyable. While I'm not playing it, the issues are present and frustrating and enough to not have me rushing back to it, but when I do get into it, it's more than enough to keep me in it for hours on end.

5/5 for enjoyment
5/5 for music
5/5 for graphics
4/5 for game play
3/5 for AI
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Top critical review

All critical reviews›
criscodisco
3.0 out of 5 starsA fair review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2013
In an internal memo today, Maxis' general manager Lucy Bradshaw stated, "I'd like to say that it's not fair -- that the game score shouldn't be punished for a server problem. But it is fair." So with that, I present an attempt to provide a fair review of this game in its current state. A lot of the reviews here are mostly rages against EA and their insistence upon forcing "draconian" DRM policies upon their customers. DRM is the least of the problems with this game.

It's definitely not all bad. The game itself is beautiful, and serene. The aesthetics are a huge step away from previous releases and in the right direction. Some may complain that it is too "cartoon-ish" but I was a big fan of the solid colors of the game. I found myself just staring and appreciating random buildings. The game looks very clean and polished. I want to live in this city. Lens effects and filters help you create a perfect look for your city. A city with a lot of heavy industry looks great with the vintage filter, and the black and red filter would accentuate a crime-ridden casino town.

As with most SC releases, the music is gorgeous and creates an atmosphere that sucks you in. It is not at all annoying, harsh, or blaring. When you go to different data views, building menus, or just pause the game, the music transitions seamlessly to a "lite" version. When I did notice the music, I loved it.

Building upgrades and improvements are a big part of the gameplay, and necessary for your city to succeed. Almost every ploppable building has an upgrade, from adding signs and flagpoles, to entire wings of a petroleum or mining headquarters. You find yourself having to really think about what you want your city to specialize in, and you have to plan accordingly. If you want to have a highly educated city, you better remember to allow yourself plenty of room for university dormitories and schools.

Which brings us to strategy. With the small tile size, you have to meticulously plan. Wind direction, resources, and location within the region all come into play. A tile heavy with coal could possibly be a great industrial and power district, but you have to account for where it stands in relation to its neighbors within the region. If it's upwind, all that air pollution will spill over into the next town. If there's a huge water table, you may want to consider not polluting it, and instead using it to provide water to neighboring cities. Resources are finite, and solely devoting a city to the exploitation of any resource will go bad for you when it's all dried up. The game is very challenging, and can present unforeseen circumstances to your every move.

Traffic is a huge problem that I ran into. Fully upgraded avenues with plenty of mass transit would still clog up, and cause havoc all over the city. Power plants will shut down because the trucks delivering resources would be unable to push through the traffic. The effect on emergency services is the worst. Sims are hardheaded and do not move out of the way for firetrucks, so your city will burn to the ground while the firefighters are stuck in traffic. This is a problem with the simulation, and needs to be remedied. Again, with the small tile size, it's very hard to get around that once your city gets to a certain size. Bottlenecks at the entrance to your city is an all too common occurrence. And you only have one entrance.

Now for the really bad. The game's simulation relies heavily upon the client-server relationship. When those servers are flaking out, the game flakes out. This isn't simply a multiplayer issue, but a problem at the core level of the game. Resources, money, workers, and utilities don't get transferred between cities, utility upgrades have a slow effect within the city, and upgrades aren't shared in the region. Those are the least troublesome issues. Actually being able to play is the larger issue. When I could get onto a server, my regions would disappear and reappear at random and loading another city would seize up the game.

The small tile size is another problem, but I won't spend too much time on it. Maxis has stated that future patches (hopefully not DLC) will fix that. As it stands right now, the tile size forces you to play as a region. That's all well and good in practice, and something I actually appreciate and love. However if the servers are flaking out, you can not play as a region. All of the interaction between regions is handled by the servers, so it becomes an exercise in futility and you're stuck in your single, helpless, miserable, and rapidly failing little city.

This is, of course, assuming you can get into the game at all. A problem that I'm sure will soon be remedied, so I won't drill them on that. I have faith they will fix the current server issues. With that said, this isn't a launch day (week) problem. It is a problem with the core functionality of the game. Your regions are not synced between servers. All your hard work would come to a dead stop if the server upon which it is built is unavailable. Logging on to a new server will have you start from scratch. How in the world, in a game built primarily around progression and creation, are we to create and progress under those circumstances? All my hard work would be at the mercy of a single server. As beautiful and challenging as the game is, this is a deal breaker. Bear in mind, this is all from a single-player perspective. I have no idea of the quagmire that is multiplayer.

I have devoted a lot of time and faith to this franchise. I've purchased every release of SC since it's inception, and I've spent countless hours enjoying it immensely. I would consider myself a part of its faithful fanbase; one which continues to build, mod, and enjoy SC4 10 years after its release. I feel as though Maxis has turned their backs on us. I know they put a lot of love and hard work into this release, and the aesthetics and depth of simulation are to show for that. However, aesthetics and depth of simulation are for naught if we can't play the game as its forebears intended. The soul of this franchise is creation. In this release, creation is dependent upon the health of a single server. This isn't conducive to the needs of SC's loyal and patient fanbase. We won't be willing or able to play this game 10 years down the road, and there won't be a huge modding community built around it. It saddens me to walk away from it. I requested and was granted a full refund. If they allow us to play the single player game offline, where we can use mods, and for Pete's sake, simply save our hard work on our own hardware, then maybe they can have my money back.

UPDATE 2014-05-14: I've since repurchased the game (on sale) after Maxis patched it to allow offline single player mode. This was back in March. Other than that, I don't have much to add because I really haven't played it that much. Which I guess sort of says something within itself. It is far less frustrating when you're not depending on servers. Traffic problems seem to be better. That said, I still see myself getting bored, because of the low tile size. I find I'm constantly switching back and forth between cities to deal with resource issues. That gets dull rather quickly. I'm hoping for bigger tiles in a future patch, or that EA will open the thing up for modding. +1 star for offline.
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From the United States

Brandon Staggs
4.0 out of 5 stars Still an excellent game
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 15, 2013
Verified Purchase
I lucked out and happened to be one of the ones who didn't have any server issues at launch. Was able to download and play within about 20 mins. Was on and playing for over 3 hours with no connection issues after that. As always with me, would rather point out the cons and finish up with the pros.

Cons
1) City Size. While I understand why they did this, it's still frustrating on many levels. The major frustration comes from if you don't realize the true limitations you try to do everything in one city and end up fighting traffic, budget deficit issues, and the never ending demand of RCI. Instead, the concept of this game is to not have a single giant city but instead to have several smaller specialized ones. When you realize this and you plan accordingly, your regions really prosper.

2) City Safety. No matter how many buildings you have and even if you max them out, there's never enough to go around or you're stymied by traffic. In one of my cities, I have over 60 police cars, 4 detective vans, and 4 crime prevention vans and yet there's still too much crime. It wasn't until I looked closer at the entrance to the city that I realized the issue was:

3) Traffic. I've watched videos, read write-ups, and tried out many different road lay outs but I still can't get around the massive rush hour traffic that just about shuts all my cities down. In my tourism city I have 2 train stations, a port with a cruise line, over 25 street cars and over 30 buses and I can't keep up with the traffic. I try to route traffic specifically by park & go's and bus stops, I try and route local sims to business instead of into major throughways, and I try to keep the traffic from the trains and port routing to the tourism sites but none of it helps. Don't even get me started on by oil/ore/coal cities.

4) AI. Now, I'm sure they'll fix this eventually, and a lot of different reviews (amateur and professional alike) have hit on this already, but the AI is stupid in this game. Pathing, city service deployment, transportation, you name it. You have 3 T-intersections in an area completely clogged up but 2 blocks up and over there's 3 cars total passing through the entire road line. Why wouldn't they reroute the traffic jam to utilize the open roads? 3 cop cars, 2 fire trucks and 2 ambulances coming up behind you, don't pull over to the side and let them by or anything, just flip 'em off and continue waiting in the gridlock. I mean really, why would you not program certain vehicles to have a higher priority on the roads or to have the other cars move to the side for emergency vehicles. Half my city is burning because a) my fire trucks decided to go through downtown at rush hour instead of taking the alternate path and b) they're stuck in rush hour because no one lets them by.

Pros
1) Addicting. This type of game is how I wish all games were. It's addicting enough to keep you involved for hours upon hours while playing and you can work on city upgrade plans in the back of your mind while not playing. But the level of addiction isn't so bad as it's all you want to do. I can easily drop 2-3 hours in an evening and it flies by, but once I walk away I don't have any overwhelming urge to run back to it. Mind you this is a personal Pro because user experiences will vary, but for me it's what makes it an ideal game.

2) Graphics. While it's a simple city-planning style game, I really love the flow and look of the graphics. Realistic enough to leave an awe inspiring feelings of accomplishment as your city grows into a sprawling metropolis but not so much that you take the game overly serious. It's beautiful and the depth of overall visuals are extremely pleasing. Everything from the plans flying overhead (even if you don't have airports yet in your region), to the random boats passing by through your water ways, to the changing time of day (even if it sometimes is to dark at night) is just satisfying. It's nice to play a game that's still a game and not focusing on hyper-realism (graphics wise).

3) Regions. While I initially disliked the city sizes, once I realized the possibilities of creating a fully functioning region I actually started getting pretty excited about the possibilities. It takes some getting used to, planning out the individual cities to work in tandem with each other is really a fun and new take on for Sim City. Before you had a large area (probably the same size as a region) to build a multi-purpose city that involved everything, here you have smaller cities that add up to make the whole region. Similar to how you have a county with smaller city/towns that make it up and each city/town adds different things to the overall county. I'd really like to see at some point in the games future where they actually interconnect Regions with planes/boats/trains and truly turn the game from a single city/region responsibility to a true world environment.

4) Overall game play. I cannot knock on how they've managed to pull everything together on this game. Given, the last SimCity I played actively was 3000 so I'm not sure of how 4 played, but I really love the smooth game play implementation of this iteration. Takes a few failed cities/regions to realize the major changes, but once you do it really is a good game and helps add to and build up the SimCity legacy. The menus are extremely easy to navigate and find. The advisors give pretty decent advice even if they are redundant or obvious.

5) Music! I'm a music nut, in my opinion music is the true window into the soul. The sound track (when it works) is really amazing and even listening to it for over 4 hours still sounds fresh. I also like how it changes depending on your zoom level. Just overall amazing. As for the "when it works" comment, I've found that once the city hits a certain size or there's just so much going on in the city the sound will die out or glitch on a specific sound. Like if you clicked on your Police Dept while sirens were going off in the background and traffic noise was being introduced ontop of whatever the engine handling all of that gets over loaded and just loops those noises over and over again until you exit out and reload. Rather annoying.

In summary, despite the epic launch day issues (even though I didn't experience them), the DRM/Always on requirement, and the occasional sound glitch, the game is still fun and enjoyable. While I'm not playing it, the issues are present and frustrating and enough to not have me rushing back to it, but when I do get into it, it's more than enough to keep me in it for hours on end.

5/5 for enjoyment
5/5 for music
5/5 for graphics
4/5 for game play
3/5 for AI
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Tugs Parra
4.0 out of 5 stars A Real Review - Not a DRM Complaint
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 24, 2013
Verified Purchase
This product has a lot of one star reviews as of time of writing. After reading them it appears they stem from the obviously botched launch where EA underestimated the demand for this game and didn't have enough capacity to handle it. This has since been fixed. Unfortunately, the reviews have not - they have simply become a forum for people to vent their frustrations about EA, which belongs elsewhere. (I have my major beef with EA, but you're not going to see much about it here.)

So the burning question I'll answer right away is this: Will players of the original SimCity games like this title? Before I answer, let me illustrate how I play the series - I classify myself as a semi-casual/semi-serious player of the series. I don't play it every day but I do play it in chunks for periods of time and have done so with every version of SimCity since the original release way back when. I find this title to be very enjoyable. No more managing underground pipes or other minutae like this. Maxis has balanced out a lot of the little nitty gritty to allow you to focus on the overall plan for your city and slowly work towards growing it. Power and water now move about as part of your road system, and building density is dictated by road density. No, the game is not dumbed down and is still technical, it's been re-balanced to be accessible and allow you to freely pursue your big plans.

New to the game is regional play. You can play public regions, invite only regions, or solo (invite only, don't invite anyone). Cities affect other cities since certain things, like a department of finance, open up other options for EVERYONE in the region. This adds a new layer of strategy, especially when you have different mayors in a region, and feels more like how the real world of city management operates today. Cities can share resources, city services, job and housing demands, and also collaborate on great works, which are massive dedicated projects which benefit the entire region (one example is the return of the famous Arcology from SC2000). You can help a friend out who is starting a city be lending them fire, garbage, or police coverage to help them progress in a certain direction free from distractions - if they coordinate with you and how is between you two and lends a marvelous new experience to the series. You can also visit other cities in the region as if they were your own (except no mayor tools when on tour), which lets you learn from the strategies of others.

Is this game a "social media" game? NO. They nailed the social interactivity to be well suited for the historic roots of this series, but allow it to feel fresh and modern. There are no facebook buttons to be had in this game.

Another new feature is specialization. You can specialize a city in things like mining, oil production, gambling, tourism, and more. This plays into the larger regional picture where you could have low wealth sims travel by train between two cities to live and work in a casino, for instance. You can also edit certain kinds of buildings to add "expansion modules" - you can build up police stations, fire stations, power plants, the town hall, and lots of other places with expansions which affect their coverage rate, effectiveness, and unlock more building options for you to further build your city or provide region wide building unlocks.

This is just a quick glance at some of the new ways this SimCity has worked to innovate but still honor the expectations of veteran players of the series. Is it perfect? No. No SimCity has been, but it definitely feels smarter, sleeker, and more fun overall.

So now to speak to the Digital Rights Management (DRM) so many have complained about. Yes, this game has DRM. Yes, you have to play with a constant internet connection, which is a massive difference from what has traditionally been an offline series. THE BOX SAYS THIS ON THE COVER. So far every single person who has bought this game has had plenty of opportunity to read this and make a purchasing decision. Yes, it has been proven the game can be played offline. Yes, your cities are saved on the server and not your PC. Yes, there are a whole host of ethical, technical, and whatever else issues associated with this. Yes, EA is a big company interested in money. I'm not saying their decision to make the game require an internet pipe all the time is a good one. If you don't like EA's philosophy, vote with your money and don't buy the game. Complaining afterward does no good. Amazon has SimCity 4 for cheap, it waits for you, if you want it.

Now, to talk about how DRM affects my regular play: It doesn't. I'm usually playing in shared regions I've invited friends to, which means I am online anyway. My internet is always online. I'm not going out of my way to stay online. I enjoy the multiplayer aspects of the game quite a bit and find working cooperatively is a lot of fun. So to me, the DRM requirements, while draconian, really aren't affecting me on a practical level. I read the box, knew what I was getting into, and made my decision accordingly. It "feels" balanced - EA gets a reasonable DRM setup and I get a reasonably fun game. Bottom line, as I said earlier, vote with your dollars AND READ THE BOX BEFORE YOU BUY.

Overall I like this game and give it 4 stars. It isn't perfect but it is an enjoyable experience. Read the box and think about if you agree with the changes they've made to the series before you buy. And if you buy, I wish you luck as a new Mayor. If you don't, kudos to you for standing by your philosophies.
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Brandon Densmore
4.0 out of 5 stars Brutal setup with Origin and game launch, but finally got to play
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 5, 2013
Verified Purchase
Despite the numerous complaints I had read about Origin, I decided the game itself looked too fantastic to pass up. In fact, I'm sitting here with a snow day and an usual slice of time that I could spend playing this much anticipated game. However, I am still contending with getting the game installed via Origin. Here has been my experience thus far:

1. Purchased the game on Amazon
2. Followed the detailed instructions on how to install/setup origin
3. I am unable to get beyond Step #10 - which is to "View in Library" within Origin.

Essentially I provided my game key to Origin, where they acknowledge and accepted my key, but the game fails to show up in my game library. Consequently I can't get to the game to download it - let alone play it. It's apparently a known issue to them. I their Help screens I found the following statement:

"We're aware that for some users SimCity is not showing up in their My Games Library, Origin is working on the issue. In some cases refreshing Origin resolves the issue."

So I noticed that Origin has a Live Chat feature to get assistance. I click the link and find there is a 35-40 minute wait time to chat with the next available Advisor. After waiting for a good 15 minutes I decided I'd try to Refresh the games library which led me to restart Origin - which failed to let me log out. Not only did it fail to work, but it killed my Chat window where I had been waiting patiently. I then rebooted Origin, clicked on "Live Chat" again and now the wait was now 45-50 minutes. Ughh!!!!

At this point I'm sitting with 25-30 minutes of wait time. Assuming they resolve my issue, I'll still have to download the actual game itself before I can play it. So far my experience with Origin has been irritating to say the least. This experience is making me appreciate Steam (which says a lot).

This whole experience makes me wonder if they rushed too quickly to market. Clearly this is a serious distribution problem - Origin issues and it sounds like others are struggling with servers in-game.

I'll revise my rating once I get to play the game - whenever that might be. If Origin is interested in doing the right thing they should grant the deluxe edition for free to people who have to sit through this nonsense. For crying out loud - it's a $60 game, right???

**UPDATE: It's now 3 hours later. When I was down to 5-10 minutes of wait time, the game finally appeared on its own in the My Games Library. I then quickly downloaded the game, launched and it then spent quite some time patching itself. When that finally completed, I launched the game again (per instruction) and got an error message, "Our service is currently down. We are fixing the problem. Please check back soon." I would echo what other reviewers have said - this wouldn't be an issue if you could play the game offline. Not a deal-breaker for me, but obviously they're having Day-1 release problems. I'd certainly call this a major failure on their part since they have known just how much buzz there is around this release. Yikes, EA...

**UPDATE: After roughly 6 hours of waiting, I finally managed to get into the game. However, I have reason to believe most of the cause was related to the Origin setup. After many attempts, I did some searching around Origin and found out that I should have received a confirmation email from Origin to "activate" my account. I never got an email from them, so I triggered the email from their site. This allowed me to activate the account. That still didn't do the trick, however, until I completely logged out of Origin and then logged back in. At that point I was prompted to create a screen name and a password recovery question. Viola! This finally seemed to do the trick as I was finally able to play the game. So my advice to those using origin for the first time is to make sure you're getting an email to activate your account. If not, that will keep you from playing. Second, be sure you've been prompted to create a screen name in Origin. If those two things happen my hope is you'll get into the game as I did. Unfortunately I stumbled upon the resolution myself as the previous error message led me to believe the servers were the cause (and they may have been also - not sure).

That said, I got to play the game for a good 3 hours or so. I really enjoy the game play thus far and I disagree with those who believe the cities are way too small. As it stands there are 8 or so selectable regions and each region has a certain number of city plots. If I recall, the regions have anywhere from 3 city plots up to 16 - depends on how large an area you want to deal with. Now you can't fill an entire region with "all city" as you could in Sim City 4, but I was never able (or committed enough) to fill an entire region in SC4 anyway. It also doesn't look like you can create your own regions, but I'm also ok with this as I never used the feature in previous iterations of the game.

What I enjoy most is that you don't have to micro-manage nearly as much of the game as you did in SC4. For instance, I never cared for managing a network of pipes or running power lines all over the map. In real life it's safe to say that pipes and power tend to align with road networks - and they were able to simplify things by aligning those networks to roads automatically. I like the flexibility to create roads and route them however you'd like - including circular roads, curves, rectangular, etc. I especially like the graphs/overlays in this version. You have great indicators at your disposal and I have found the menus to be very intuitive.

I am changing my rating to 4 stars. I give 5 stars to the game itself - the other star is taken off due to the install headaches.
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Matt Stein
4.0 out of 5 stars READ BEFORE YOU BUY
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 14, 2014
Verified Purchase
EA has announced that they will be adding an offline feature for SimCity 2013, so any previous problems with the constant internet connection will be resolved.

Furthermore, for those poor unfortunate souls who bought the game at launch, lemme say, please give this game another try. After the first week of hell that Origin and EA caused, let me be the first to say, EA did a fantastic job at putting one hell of a game together. EA definately poured it's heart out into a fantastic game, and if you give this game a second shot, it won't let you down.

Pros:

Streets: EA made sure that the streets were a vital part of SimCity 2013, and boy did they do so. The game features more options on laying down your roads featuring curves, circles, and even a square option, which I tend to use the most often. So if you want to give your city's street designs some flair, you now have an unlimited possibility on designing your dream layout of your city.

Specializations: The game now features a new concept that hasn't been in Sim City games of yesteryear. The game features new city specializations that allow you to make your city dedicated to one, or multiple, different focuses. Say you wanted your city to become a new Las Vegas? Well, with the new gambling specialization, you can turn your city into a gambler's paradise! Even if you want to focus on more serious specializations, say you want a high tech city that churns out numerous processors per day? Well, my friend, you're in luck. The game features so many different focuses to shape your city towards, that you can not find boredom while playing this game. It'll give you hours upon hours of different ways to customize your city into creating your dream city.

Multiplayer Function: Now, I know what the prime conception with this game and it's online play, it sucks. Let me be the first to tell you, that this game does not suck. In fact, I tend to love that you can play with other people, and if you really don't want some guy to build a crime hole of a city next to yours, there is a private mode where you can invite the people who you know and want in your game to make the game even more fun. I believe the main reason the multiplayer function was shunned upon launch, was due to the massive server problems upon connection. Well, since EA lost most of its players, the game really shows no signs of lag now. Plus, now that EA is featuring an offline mode, there really is no reason why not to get this game.

High Scores: FINALLY! EA got smart with their Origin and decided to add something fun and competitive to one of their games! With Origin, EA created user and region high scores that are shown throughout the game, globalwide, and now there's something to strive for when playing this game, becoming the best Sim City player ever! The game's high score function can only be recorded when your region isn't in private mode, so if you have that one old region that's not quite up to par with the ones you know you can make now, then you can delete your previous one, and create the region that will take over the leaderboards!

Cons:

Origin: I know, it's Origin, the service that's destined to make EA fail and die, but honestly, if it wasn't for the required play through Origin, the mandatory account, and the horrible customer service, then I'd give this game a 5 star rating, but because this game is managed through the service made in hell, then I must give this game a 4 star rating. Seriously, if EA got rid of Origin, this game would have not been such lowly seen at launch. Please, EA, for the sake of your fans, your future, and the goodness of gaming, get rid of Origin.
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criscodisco
3.0 out of 5 stars A fair review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2013
Verified Purchase
In an internal memo today, Maxis' general manager Lucy Bradshaw stated, "I'd like to say that it's not fair -- that the game score shouldn't be punished for a server problem. But it is fair." So with that, I present an attempt to provide a fair review of this game in its current state. A lot of the reviews here are mostly rages against EA and their insistence upon forcing "draconian" DRM policies upon their customers. DRM is the least of the problems with this game.

It's definitely not all bad. The game itself is beautiful, and serene. The aesthetics are a huge step away from previous releases and in the right direction. Some may complain that it is too "cartoon-ish" but I was a big fan of the solid colors of the game. I found myself just staring and appreciating random buildings. The game looks very clean and polished. I want to live in this city. Lens effects and filters help you create a perfect look for your city. A city with a lot of heavy industry looks great with the vintage filter, and the black and red filter would accentuate a crime-ridden casino town.

As with most SC releases, the music is gorgeous and creates an atmosphere that sucks you in. It is not at all annoying, harsh, or blaring. When you go to different data views, building menus, or just pause the game, the music transitions seamlessly to a "lite" version. When I did notice the music, I loved it.

Building upgrades and improvements are a big part of the gameplay, and necessary for your city to succeed. Almost every ploppable building has an upgrade, from adding signs and flagpoles, to entire wings of a petroleum or mining headquarters. You find yourself having to really think about what you want your city to specialize in, and you have to plan accordingly. If you want to have a highly educated city, you better remember to allow yourself plenty of room for university dormitories and schools.

Which brings us to strategy. With the small tile size, you have to meticulously plan. Wind direction, resources, and location within the region all come into play. A tile heavy with coal could possibly be a great industrial and power district, but you have to account for where it stands in relation to its neighbors within the region. If it's upwind, all that air pollution will spill over into the next town. If there's a huge water table, you may want to consider not polluting it, and instead using it to provide water to neighboring cities. Resources are finite, and solely devoting a city to the exploitation of any resource will go bad for you when it's all dried up. The game is very challenging, and can present unforeseen circumstances to your every move.

Traffic is a huge problem that I ran into. Fully upgraded avenues with plenty of mass transit would still clog up, and cause havoc all over the city. Power plants will shut down because the trucks delivering resources would be unable to push through the traffic. The effect on emergency services is the worst. Sims are hardheaded and do not move out of the way for firetrucks, so your city will burn to the ground while the firefighters are stuck in traffic. This is a problem with the simulation, and needs to be remedied. Again, with the small tile size, it's very hard to get around that once your city gets to a certain size. Bottlenecks at the entrance to your city is an all too common occurrence. And you only have one entrance.

Now for the really bad. The game's simulation relies heavily upon the client-server relationship. When those servers are flaking out, the game flakes out. This isn't simply a multiplayer issue, but a problem at the core level of the game. Resources, money, workers, and utilities don't get transferred between cities, utility upgrades have a slow effect within the city, and upgrades aren't shared in the region. Those are the least troublesome issues. Actually being able to play is the larger issue. When I could get onto a server, my regions would disappear and reappear at random and loading another city would seize up the game.

The small tile size is another problem, but I won't spend too much time on it. Maxis has stated that future patches (hopefully not DLC) will fix that. As it stands right now, the tile size forces you to play as a region. That's all well and good in practice, and something I actually appreciate and love. However if the servers are flaking out, you can not play as a region. All of the interaction between regions is handled by the servers, so it becomes an exercise in futility and you're stuck in your single, helpless, miserable, and rapidly failing little city.

This is, of course, assuming you can get into the game at all. A problem that I'm sure will soon be remedied, so I won't drill them on that. I have faith they will fix the current server issues. With that said, this isn't a launch day (week) problem. It is a problem with the core functionality of the game. Your regions are not synced between servers. All your hard work would come to a dead stop if the server upon which it is built is unavailable. Logging on to a new server will have you start from scratch. How in the world, in a game built primarily around progression and creation, are we to create and progress under those circumstances? All my hard work would be at the mercy of a single server. As beautiful and challenging as the game is, this is a deal breaker. Bear in mind, this is all from a single-player perspective. I have no idea of the quagmire that is multiplayer.

I have devoted a lot of time and faith to this franchise. I've purchased every release of SC since it's inception, and I've spent countless hours enjoying it immensely. I would consider myself a part of its faithful fanbase; one which continues to build, mod, and enjoy SC4 10 years after its release. I feel as though Maxis has turned their backs on us. I know they put a lot of love and hard work into this release, and the aesthetics and depth of simulation are to show for that. However, aesthetics and depth of simulation are for naught if we can't play the game as its forebears intended. The soul of this franchise is creation. In this release, creation is dependent upon the health of a single server. This isn't conducive to the needs of SC's loyal and patient fanbase. We won't be willing or able to play this game 10 years down the road, and there won't be a huge modding community built around it. It saddens me to walk away from it. I requested and was granted a full refund. If they allow us to play the single player game offline, where we can use mods, and for Pete's sake, simply save our hard work on our own hardware, then maybe they can have my money back.

UPDATE 2014-05-14: I've since repurchased the game (on sale) after Maxis patched it to allow offline single player mode. This was back in March. Other than that, I don't have much to add because I really haven't played it that much. Which I guess sort of says something within itself. It is far less frustrating when you're not depending on servers. Traffic problems seem to be better. That said, I still see myself getting bored, because of the low tile size. I find I'm constantly switching back and forth between cities to deal with resource issues. That gets dull rather quickly. I'm hoping for bigger tiles in a future patch, or that EA will open the thing up for modding. +1 star for offline.
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Christopher Trent
3.0 out of 5 stars Getting a bad rap, but not entirely terrible.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 25, 2013
Verified Purchase
So this is the latest incarnation of the SimCity franchise and having been an avid fan of the series I finally broke down and bought it (now that it is on sale for download at $39.99). I have to say all the negative reviews had me worried, but when the price came down I figured I would take a shot. So I will start with the bad points.

Always Online DRM
While EA may claim that they added this feature to make the game social the truth is this game has had a long standing tradition of being a singleplayer game. To not even include an offline mode for players to experiment with is just like telling people "We don't want you modding our game or enjoying it on your schedule". The always online function is just a giant handicap, as the launch has proven. You must rely on EA's Servers being up (and not full), you must rely on your own ability to connect on the internet (I had no Internet during an 8 hour plane ride shortly after buying this game and it drove me crazy that I couldn't just play it offline), and of course there is the inevitability of the servers being shut down. EA is quite fond of this tactic (look at Madden and FIFA); they tweak the game slightly and re-release it as a new edition and force people to buy the newer one because in a few years they will close off the servers for any other version. I hope with SimCity they will instead offer the upgrades free, but it still means that if they decide to abandon the property you are stuck with a game that cannot be played (unless EA decides to release a patch to allow offline play before shutting down, but EA is not known for generosity like that).

Micro Transactions
The world has become a marketplace of free-to-play games that supplement themselves with micro-transactions. Essentially this allows the player to "pay to win" in some cases or make themselves stand out for everyone else to notice. It works fine in some games because there is no requirement to pay in order to advance and it works poorly in others where you are strangled with an inability to do simple tasks because you have to pay. In the case of SimCity however, EA has chosen to make you pay for stuff that is just ridiculously simple, things that should have been included to begin with. As of now you can pay $10 for each of the "Tile Sets" French, German, and British which change the looks of buildings to reflect these regions and add extra in game monuments from those places. This is the kind of thing that should be $2-3 dollars, it adds nothing of any substantial value to the game and is cosmetic for the most part. Also the Heroes and Villains pack can be bought for $10 and adds Maxis Man and Dr. Wu to the game. Neither is anything more than some slight eye candy with a bit of a comical twist (Maxis Man must be paid to save people and Dr. Wu will help your industry, but increases crime and when unleashed his henchmen can demolish a city with their robots). This is content that should be included in all versions of the game. I understand the need for a "Deluxe" version, but really a deluxe version should have come with something more exclusive like a unique Great Work (Orbital Elevator anyone?) or a set of new regions (I am mystified as to why there are none with differing climates, such as snow or tropical). Hopefully EA won't nickel and dime everyone to death by releasing garbage DLC like this and demanding $10 to make your city look like a Brazilian flavela or inspired Asian architecture.

Limited Gameplay Model
This is probably one of the worst offenses the game commits and the most annoying. The standard open ended city building from previous versions is gone. Cities are now linked in "regions" and each city interacts with the other in order to provide an overall support structure. While this works well in a solo region where you know what you need to provide and how to do it, it makes those solo regions tedious as you must hop from city to city to set up services for each other city. If you try to do everything in one city the decidedly small size of the cities now makes it look like a village and not a true city. Now should you play with other people online there is a marked tendency for nothing to update properly, or for other players to grief you by having their pollution blow onto your city, deliberately avoiding law enforcement so their criminals can vandalize your town, or to cut themselves off entirely from the region by refusing to provide any services such as water, sewage, or garbage. That is if they even actively play at all. I am not sure if it was the server I was on that wasn't updating or what, but three of my neighbors had no activity after days of gameplay. Another affront is the lack of any kind of terrain management. You cannot raise or lower any land, which makes placing some buildings annoyingly challenging (such as an airport) and makes other buildings dig themselves 20 feet into the ground and looking simple ridiculous. You can't create your own islands or jetties in water, instead you have to deal with the terrain you have and in mountainous areas this makes the already small cities seem downright tiny.

Glitchy Gameplay
While EA has been addressing these issues in patches and updates, it still feels like the game was released without any proper testing, especially in the multiplayer aspect which is what EA has hyped so heavily. There are buildings that fail to function as intended, traffic becomes incredibly hard to manage when a city reaches a population over 100,000, service vehicles such as ambulances and fire trucks have decidedly broken pathing AI, and updates to progress on things like the Great Works are completely unreliable as they fluctuate wildly depending on which city you view them from. Hopefully EA will continue to address these issues, but some of the bugs seem like things that should have been caught and fixed before release.

No Saving Feature
You do not get to choose when the city will save. Certain actions do cause a save (such as logging out or sometimes when switching cities, but not always and especially not if you are switching rapidly between cities) point to be made, but without an ability to save yourself you can lose progress quite easily if the unexpected happens (such as the servers going down or losing you connection). It seems ridiculous that they can't just include a manual save button that will make the server save the game when requested. I know some people will claim that this will cause horrendous lag I doubt that would be an issue as cheetah speed was causing horrendous lag and EA fixed that.

With those points outlined I simply cannot give this game a rating better than average. The gameplay is still fun and it is still SimCity, but much of what made the series great has been taken away. Coupled with the bad DRM, micro-transactions, and buggy gameplay and this is probably something you can pass on unless you are a die hard Sim fan. Maybe if the game comes down in price to $19.99 or so, but as it stands now it just isn't a great value for the limited fun you can derive from it.
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Shimes
4.0 out of 5 stars Good Game
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 19, 2013
Verified Purchase
I got this game about 4 days ago and haven't had any of the server problems mentioned in the reviews. I'm running on Windows 7 Professional on an Alienware Aurora box. I set everything on maximum in the game for graphics. The game patched itself after I downloaded it. Also Origin says they fixed the server problems, so lucky me. I read the reviews on here before buying but the SimCity itch outweighed negative reviews.

The game is pretty engrossing like all the SimCity games, and I think it's a big step up from SimCity4. A lot of the annoying micromanagement that was no fun is now gone, don't have to deal with pipes, wires, etc. It's really cool that you can choose how you want to upgrade buildings, kind of a civilization type feel for that part. The 3D acts a lot more like 3D now, the mouse movement and navigation is a lot better, I wish they would just used standard mouse navigation though, as used in a lot of 3d games, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. But navigation is still pretty good. I hated the scrolling and navigation in SimCity4.

I've got about 20 hours of play time and haven't had any server problems yet. I do wish it would tell you when it last sync'd to the server, I just do a logout and exit the game every once and a while to make sure it syncs to the server, I couldn't find any manual sync.

Negatives for me are the "Play" menu, if I hit "Play" that means I want to play, not scroll through hundreds of regions to find a spot that's available. They need to put the most likely regions at the top. It took me a lot of digging to even find a region to play in. Another negative, is when the rest of the players are offline, their city stays in the same state, so one dude built a bunch of nuclear reactors with an obscene city name, let the reactors melt down, then never played again. So I have his criminals constantly coming into my city, pretty annoying. I sent my police over to his city but didn't seem to have any effect... I guess they only work if he's online. I'll wait till city shows as abandoned then presumably I can take it over and clean it up. So I'm still not convinced on the multi-player part, but is only minor problem for my city, but I'm going to try the challenges and see how that works. My opinion is that if a user does not log in for 48 hours to their city other players should be allowed to make changes to it, or at least have that as a region option. Also, there are some obvious glitches in the 3d rendering. A lot of my buildings will flash with some sort of transparency, and no matter what the settings I can't get that to go away. I've got a really nice box, so I don't think it's my video card, again this isn't a major problem for me, but I hope they fix it soon since i like clean graphics.

Anyway, overall thumbs up, it's a great game and amazing simulation, and a much better game than SimCity4.
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Nicholas Ewalt
4.0 out of 5 stars Really, It's unfinished
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 25, 2013
Verified Purchase
I really love the SimCity franchise. I've been a cult follower since SimCity 2000, but SimCity really lets me down. I find SimCity to be a failure of a simulation, with so many bugs left and right after a few hours you won't know how to get by anymore. Here's a few bugs, just to list a few:

- Traffic drives around endlessly for hours. No really. Watch your cars drive in endless circles and loops, sometimes making uturns repeatedly, staying on the same block of road for days. You thought it was possible to manage traffic? Try doing it when hundreds of your cars are just driving in circles, and you can't build one way streets, toll booths, or manage the lights in any way at all.

- Additional emergency vehicles are often useless. You must be thinking, TWO ambulances MUST be better than one, right? Wrong! In SimCity, it's not uncommon for 10 of your firetrucks all to rush to the same fire only to have 9 wait in line while 1 puts it out. Another fire breaks out in your city while the first is burning to the ground?! QUICK! Send some firetrucks! You can't! They're all waiting in line to put out the first. Good luck while your city burns to the ground.

+ On the upside, EA recently posted a patch that is "supposed" to fix this error. For one, Police officers no longer swarm as badly, and tend to spread out around your city more, but the problem isn't completely fixed, and it's still not uncommon to have half your police force rush to a single crime, ignoring others.

- The homeless problem makes no sense. Homeless people appear when your low wealth run out of money. If medium or high wealth go bankrupt they move out, but if low wealth run out, they turn into homeless. Homeless people, from my experience, never get jobs, and never leave your city, except via intranational bus routes. Instead, they sit around in your parks taking up valuable visitor slots, and cause crime. There is not currently a way to build homeless shelters, and setting taxes to 0% won't prevent homeless from appearing.

And that doesn't even get me started on the supersims bug
When you set all taxes to 0%, people just keep making money. Nobody ever needs anything, because they're so happy they have so much money. Forget water or power services, garbage, even jobs or things to buy. With enough money, your sims eventually stop caring, and you can get millions of sims in a region with NOTHING but residential and 0% taxes. This bug has not been fixed or addressed, but does require some setup in order to get to the point where the game starts bulk-calculating needs, and money begins to outweigh every other need.

All in all, I really love this game. I really want to love this game. But I just can't let myself get roped into EA's terrible DLC scheme: Release a game barely finished (read: beta) and then release pay-to-win patches/content so those who remotely care about the leaderboard are forced to buy your shitty DLC or fall behind. Not to mention it's really SimTown based on the buildable zone size.

This opinion is generated based on 600+ hours of gameplay, including Beta's 2 and 3.
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Tony
1.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps after a dozen patches this game will be worth it, but right now, it's just junk.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 24, 2013
Verified Purchase
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.
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Ralph
1.0 out of 5 stars If you are stupid buy this game
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2013
Verified Purchase
Review of Simcity 5

Basically, this game is a joke. It is so poorly designed and broken that you are going not going to spend much time on it. Whether it's worth $60 for the little entertainment you will get out of it is your decision to make.

Here is the short version:

The land area you are allowed to develop is very small. I mean tiny small. Any resources there are quickly depleted, especially clean water. When you complete your Great Works the game is pretty much over. There just isn't any more reason to keep playing.
Building a viable city is pretty easy if you keep your population under 250k. The "social" features built into the game are worthless and basically make the game unplayable (and you can't sell/lend it to anyone). Check the Amazon reviews before you buy this game.

The Long version:

The very first "problem" with Simcity 5 is that you MUST run the Origin Loader from which you launch your various Origin games. The problem with this loader is the usual with Loader type interfaces. They are easily hacked allowing both access to your personal information (from the company servers) and the hackers can easily insert trojans, key loggers and whatever else they care to into your start up sequence. As this Loader runs in the background it can easily be scanning your hardware and checking out software or other files you have on your computer, all without you having a clue as to what it is doing. This program loads upon bootup and wants to run 100% of the time your computer is turned on.

Not only does the Origin Loader not add value, it forces you to look at advertisements of the "spam" variety. It also adds extra needless steps to start the game.
Another thing a Loader does is remove your ability to re-sell or lend the games you have purchased. Everything is forever attached to your account whether you want it to be or not. Welcome to EA, voted the most hated company in America!

This is another of the increasingly "always on line" games that are coming out. This is a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM). What the company tells you is that it's to help prevent cheating. While that is somewhat true it also assures the company you will not be re-selling or lending their (you are just renting these games, you don't own them) games to friends and other prospective customers.
Another problem with always on line games is what happens when (not if) the company pulls the plug on the game servers. Google for a list of the game servers that EA has already pulled the plug on. It's quite extensive.
Rates a 0 out of 5.

The CEO of Origin made several claims about why the games are only saved to the Origin Game servers. The briefest examination will have you rolling your eyes at the absurdity of his statements and gives you an excellent insight into just how stupid the developers think their customers are.
BTW, this is the same CEO that was fired less than a month after the abysmal release of Simcity 5. Hopefully, he will only be the first head to roll over this debacle.

Notice all the problems and we don't even have the game started yet!

All the previous Simcity games have been THE example of the single player game up to this point. EA decided that this version was going to multi-player (they claim it's a MMO) whether you wanted multi-player or not. This was yet another contrived reason to save the games to Origin Servers only (DRM).
Since you must save all your games to the Origin Servers the game area is kept quite small. If you like big cities <makes the Jedi wave> "this is not the game you are looking for."

Version 5 carries over most of the previous Simcity methods. Just don't go looking for Terraforming or Subways. They did not make the cut.
They do have resources such as Coal, Ore and Oil that you can exploit for cash and/or can be used to create a Great Works such as a Spaceport. But first you have to research the Great Works with a College. As far as I can tell this is the only reason to have a College to do research projects.
Hint: Don't gather resources until you have researched your Great Project otherwise you will have depleted them before you are ready to start building!
After you finish the research needed for a Great Works and tell it to start building you need to quit the game for several hours while the game waits for Origin to get around to telling your game, "Yeah, it's OK to build this".
Rates a 1 out of 5.

You can gift several resources to another city in your Region but unfortunately, because everything has to go through the Origin Servers, you will be waiting at least 24 RL (real life) hours to never for the goods to be delivered. While the concept for gifting is nice the unpredictable and huge time delay makes the feature useless. The method for sharing and gifting is not intuitive and is, like most everything else in the game, not explained anywhere.
Rates a 1 out of 5.

A clean water supply will be THE big concern, especially in industrial cities. Turns out the "trick" is to co-locate your Sewer Plant and Water Plants as close together as you can manage. Be sure to plop them FAR from industry, like on the other side of the map!
Plan on adding a 2nd of both buildings as you pass the 300k population mark.
Hint: When your population starts going past 250k start removing large swaths of Residential area. Try and uncover areas that have minerals or water.
Many maps have little water so you will be looking to your neighbors. They will not be wanting to have surplus Water/Sewer plants taking up valuable space either so don't expect much excess to be available to purchase. There is no desalination plant in the game so this artificial scarcity will be your biggest limiting factor in what you are allowed to do.
Rates a 1/2 out of 5.

The ability to "rent out" city services is nice. The providing city makes a bit of income and the city receiving the services will only use them as needed, saving big time on expensive Hospitals, etc.
Recycling trucks can also be shared (saving on garbage pickup and processing) and will end up being a big part of your income in the later game. (hint, reclaim Alloy!)
With your population over 300k your Utilities bill will always be way more than your normal income. You will have to make money through producing trade goods in some fashion. Notice that your natural resources WILL eventually run out so be ready to do without them.
Rates a 3 out of 5.

Laying roads will be your first concern. I have found that a six lane road with rail somewhat near the edge of the map will eliminate many traffic problems in the later game. While expensive, you will be making plenty of money at first and you can use this road to create the oversized areas that many buildings will need. If you take the time to lay out a city correctly the first time it will save you much agony in re-construction.
Hint: Be very aware of where your minerals and water supplies are when laying road.
If you do have to re-zone vast swaths don't worry too much about it. The land retains it's density value and quickly rebuilds even if you change it's zone type.
The road laying tools are poor at best and you will have to Bulldoze and re-lay roads a lot to get them to be where you want.
Rates a 2 out of 5.

For quick city growth plop down Parks. The bigger the better. Unfortunately, Homeless people (topaz colored people symbols) will collect in your Parks and degrade their usefulness. Homeless also roam around looking for abandoned buildings which they soon set on fire. This quickly becomes a time consuming drudgery as you constantly scan your city looking to Bulldoze empty buildings which are then quickly rebuilt, are re-abandoned and you have to 'doze again.
In a Private Game you can turn them off with Alt-H. Well, supposedly you can turn them off. They are still all over the map but they are far less annoying and there is no way to permanently remove them. They often collect in your Parks to the point that you have to remove the Park. There is no way to kill them off.
Rates a 0 out of 5.

Blue shopping areas are needed to keep your Sims happy. There is no benefit to clumping all the shopping into one area and I suggest you scatter small areas all around the housing zones. This will help reduce traffic as the shoppers will not have to all drive to one area and shopping near housing adds to Sim happiness (and thus, growth). You hardly make any income from shopping areas.
Rates a 2 out of 5.

Unemployment and under/over trained Sims will be a large percentage of your population. Unfortunately, you cannot designate buildings as low/middle/high class and you will have no information what-so-ever on what type of worker is needed for specialization structures (oil wells, etc). There is little you can do about this other than provide schools and then you have a over educated population that causes it's own problems.
I have yet to get even one high class resident. 400k cities and not a one. I would think they do not exist except that when I change the tax rate for high class my income does change. Another glaring programming error or intentional mis-reporting?
If there were some way to cater to or adjust the differing income classes this aspect of the game would be far more useful/enjoyable. As it is it rates a 1 out of 5.

Great Projects are the "brass ring" of Simcity 5. Unfortunately, you can only have one per Region and once it's build, that's pretty much the end of your reason to play.
While they require a lot of resources, getting these resources is actually pretty easy. Unfortunately, (gosh I use that word a lot!) getting a resource to the Great Project can be a completely bewildering process.
If you have gone to the Great Project screen and selected a resource to be supplied that's all you need to do. As soon as the selected resource is available it will be shipped out straight from the factory. Well, that's the way it's SUPPOSED to work. Unfortunately, what actually happens is your source will soon run out of storage and the plant will shut down. I have not found a reliable way to monitor what has been sent to the Great Project or to force send something. There is no need for a storage plot at a Shipping Depot if you are just supplying a Great Project.

Unfortunately, since this information has to go through the Origin Servers you will never know what has actually been delivered. In Private game mode I can switch between five cities and see five different results, anything from completely full to completely empty, all for the same resource that is sitting at max capacity at your factory.
This is completely unnecessary in Private game mode and is nothing but intentionally incompetent programming.
Rates a 0 out of 5.

In Private game mode "cheats" are allowed such as turning off Homeless and being able to Claim all the cities in one Region and play by yourself. You start with 1M in money but frankly, you make plenty of income in regular mode such that building just takes a little longer is all.
Unfortunately, (theirs that word again!) the things you are required to do to unlock improved buildings and abilities are only somewhat interesting/challenging... once. After that one time I would rather have a root canal and certainly will not subject myself to bothering with it again (Public Game).
Rates a 1/2 out of 5.

The replayability of this game just is not sufficient to keep most people playing past a couple weeks and I have absolutely no reason at all to play (with some incompetent boob) in a Public game.
The "social aspect" of this single player game was shoehorned in against vast negative feedback from their player base to meet the demands of the CEO. The same guy that was fired because the game is doing so poorly in sales within three weeks of release.
Rates a 0 out of 5.

Another glaring design error is that no matter what class (Low, Med, High) of citizen you need/have you have absolutely no control over providing homes/jobs for them. The ONLY influence you have over improving your population is to plop down a bunch of schools and then sit on your ass for several hours waiting for your people to upgrade.
Also, you will NEVER have enough population to fill all the available jobs and is exacerbated (again) by your complete inability to control/affect your population, their housing, income or education level.
Rates a 1 out of 5.
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