In SimCity 4, you don’t just build your city, you breathe life into it. Sculpt mountains, gouge riverbeds, and seed forests to lay the groundwork for your creation. Then construct the most realistic metropolis you can imagine. Your city comes alive with the hustle and bustle of construction crews, the snarl of traffic, and the activity of your Sims. Move your personalized Sims into your city and watch as they go about their daily lives. Build mansions on mountainsides, raise skyscrapers downtown, and build transportation networks to form a massive region of SimCities that share and compete for resources. With every decision you make, your city and your Sims will respond for better or worse. In SimCity 4, your city pulses with the life you give it.It’s hard to believe that creator Will Wright had trouble selling his original SimCity concept to publishers. That first game went on to fame, notoriety, and great praise–from critics, gamers, and even educators–and spawned countless imitators, not the least of which include Wright’s own smaller-scale The Sims, which went on to become a phenomenon in its own right. Now on its fourth edition, SimCity returns to our hard drives, and would-be city planners everywhere will be busy for a long, long time.
SimCity 4 functions much like its predecessors. You’ve got the power to zone land as residential (green), commercial (blue), and industrial (yellow). You control the budget. You decide where to place crucial services like police, fire, medical, and even utilities like power and water. You place schools, parks, roads, water towers, and scenery as you accede to the many demands of your Sim citizens. Do a good job and your city will grow and the money will flow into your coffers. Do a bad job and the people will pack up and move away, leaving your city treasury in horrific debt and landing you what the game cheekily considers to be a far easier job: senator. The game requires a balancing act that takes both planning and a persnickety nature. There are charts to read, reports to watch, and, above all, needs to juggle. It’s rewarding when it all comes together, and frustrating when you fail, once again, to build anything worthwhile.
That’s why I wish the game came with a better manual. The included book glosses over most major information and then neglects important aspects, such as the RCI indicator (which explains zoning needs) and parts of the budget. At the very least, the manual should include tips on handling debt. There are two tutorials which cover the basics, but again, they won’t help you get out of trouble once you get in too deep. You can find this information in the strategy guide, which is sold separately, but you really shouldn’t have to go that route.
The graphics are amazing, showing a vibrant metropolis with scurrying traffic, wandering Sims, smoking chimneys, and sparkling lights when night falls. Fireworks reward each year of service. And wait until you see the cool disasters you can unleash if the mood strikes you–fire, lightning, tornado, volcano, and giant robot. Oddly, there’s a significant performance hit even on fast systems. Thankfully, the stuttery scrolling and slow-to-respond zoom don’t hurt the game too much since you can pause it at will or fast forward if you need to wait for your cash reserves to build. The most significant flaw is that the game only offers one save slot, which discourages experimentation.
Despite minor imperfections SimCity 4 is an awesome game. You can build several cities next to each other on the map and make them dependant on each other. (You can build the greater L.A. area, in other words.) You can even import your Sims from The Sims to live in your city. Such familiar characters can tell you a lot about what your city needs. Put simply, city planning has never been this fun, this challenging, or this deep. –Andrew S. Bub
Pros:
- Beautiful graphics and animation
- Deeper and more realistic than ever before
Cons:
- Runs slowly on most systems
- Inadequate manual
List Price: $ 39.99
Price: $ 7.99
Yay!,
Unlike some people who have the crazy idea of this being the same old thing trust me it’s not. I was at the Ea exhibition in May and I was one of the lucky people who got to test the game. This game is incredible. The Graphics are very detailed and realistic. You can build more than one city on the same map. Not to mention importing your own Sims into the game. At The exhibition I saw that your city just didn’t sleep like in SimCity 3000. You see your people walking about and running their daily lives, like walking their dogs, Driving to the supermarket, Driving their kids to school even going to church!
The biggest improvement that I saw in SimCity 4 were the disasters. In SimCity 3000 you had like what? 4? In SimCity 4 you get over eight disasters. The best part is that you can control and decide where your Tornado goes. You also get Volcanoes that erupt, Erathquakes that bury houses and split open the earth, Meteor showers that leave everlasting craters and
Lightning Bolts, Fires, Riots, Floods, Mudslides, Bank Robberies and even Car chases. You get to choose you terrian styles. You can ahve an African style with Rhino’s and Giraffes. Sometimes they can even stampede into your city.
The other great thing about SimCity 4 is the terrian tools. You can sculpt gorges, Laggons, Cliffs, Craters, Valleys and even place galiciers. Then you have time settings. A 1900′s Chicago style, A 1950′S Ne York Style, And a 2000 Houston Style. Then there is the constructions of buildings. When you build your buildings they just don’t appear out of no where tou actually see your sims get into their work trucks and start to construct the building. And if the building is of no use anmore it decays and doesn’t turn into a huge big purple borded up mess. Then if you want to destroy or knock down a building it just doesn’t dissapear, you can actually impload or expload your building from any side you want. There are no old buildings from SimCity 3000, There are totally new realistic looking buildings in SimCity 4.
To me all this extra stuff makes this game totally anew. You won’t get board if you like Simulation games.
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|Imperfect, but many good ideas,
SimCity 4 is the latest in the long-survived SimCity series of games. Much like the others, the goal of the game is to contruct a burgeoning metropolis from the ground up. There are no set goals or parameters, it is very much like a sandbox where you can dictate your own expectations and try to meet them.
As the Mayor, you lay roads and zone land for development as residential, commercial, industrial, seaport, airport, and others. You build power plants and water pumping stations. You approve and reject city ordinances, keep the city safe from crime with police stations, and entertain your people with massive stadiums. All while keeping an eye on your annual income. Make no mistake – it’s complicated, filled with micromanagement, and sometimes feels more like “work” than a “game.” But the rewards for your labor are pleasant to watch.
From SimCity 3000, SimCity 4 has several major deviations – for better and for worse. Here’s a brief rundown of them:
- In a nod to The Sims (which you can also import into your city), SimCity 4′s world is somewhat persistent. You have a large “world” to develop and any given SimCity occupies a space in this world. But, they are all interconnected. The problem here is that “neighbor deals” – a substantial source of income in previous games – suddenly cease exist. You are responsible for building your neighboring cities. It would have been much cooler if the map was already dominated by a few larger cities. On the other hand, specialization is key as the world grows. You’ll find yourself building “the industrial city,” the sleepy “residential city,” and so forth. Another annoying side effect of the world system is that backing up your cities and work is rather strange – as you have to dig around in the game directories to figure out where the heck they stored your work.
- There is only one difficulty level, and it starts tough. In some ways, I appreciate this. Early on, you have to be a serious penny-pincher, viciously slashing funding for schools and other public services just to make ends meet and become profitable. This feels much more realistic as most modern US cities face the same troubles. On the other hand, it makes the game hostile to newcomers, and don’t expect those tremendous skyscrapers to appear anytime soon. You’ll be the proud Mayor of a slum for a while.
- The game makes a distinction between streets and roads. It goes insofar as to automatically place the weaker of the two when you zone land. The problem is, the automatic placement doesn’t always make the best use of land, nor jive with your intentions or existing road layouts. You can’t turn off this “feature” either, which is disappointing.
- On the flip side, the game has a neat implemention of day and night cycles. Perhaps the coolest aspect of the game, early in the morning you witness a mass exodus of automobiles and vehicles from the residential zones to the industrial zones. As night falls, the street lamps and headlights turn on and the exodus happens in reverse. It’s really a sight to behold and a testament to some of the intricate programming that’s behind the game.
However the game was, and still is, quite buggy. While recent patches have improved its stability, SimCity 4 is still quite vulnerable. There have been cases where it would crash the venerable Windows XP such that a reset was necessary. The game is also on the sluggish side, so you’ll want a high-end computer for this one. This thing taxes my machine more than Unreal Tournament 2003 does!
It’s for these reasons that I find SimCity 4 a difficult game to judge. While I appreciate the inspired focus and vision of the game and just how beautifully many parts came together, the performance and stability issues cannot be ignored. So, in closing, I rate this game as many gaming magazines have – giving Maxis the benefit of the doubt and an above-average rating. Hopefully they’ll iron out the last of the severe bugs in future patches.
By the way, I’d like to make special note of the game’s music. SimCity 4 has an absolutely fabulous soundtrack that easily ranks as one of the best I’ve heard in a long while, surpassing even its predecessor in my opinion. You want to listen to the included MP3s outside of the game – it’s that amazing. From hurried rush hour beats to soaring atmospheric pieces, this soundtrack is breathtaking!
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