SimCity review: return of a classic
For its avoidable limitations, SimCity is still a gorgeous and often captivating strategy game. It's easy to consider this the best city-building strategy game to arrive in years.
Random monster attacks can wind up distressing both Sim happiness and your firefighting capabilities.
A wealth of detail is available if you zoom in close enough.
Skyscrapers will appear if your citizens are happy, and if your streets can handle them.
This SimCity review was based on a build played at Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores office, as well as separate boxed copy using a special Origin login. The game comes out tomorrow.
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Matthew Rorie posted a new article, SimCity review: return of a classic.
For its avoidable limitations, SimCity is still a gorgeous and often captivating strategy game. It's easy to consider this the best city-building strategy game to arrive in years.-
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I'll probably keep all that on: http://properlypettingpuppies.tumblr.com/
But I might have to write something about this guy: http://cuteoverload.com/2013/03/04/rupert-aces-the-audition/
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I Give this news 10 PUPPIES! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkUcqIEqYjs
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I bet. That's something Chris and crew always enjoyed.
Puppies anway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9qJnBQh008
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lol the discrepancy between these articles: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/
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Some of the issues I'm reading there are certainly valid, but a lot of the bugs that they're running into I never encountered. I've seen other reviewers with some significant issues, with Kevin at GameSpot apparently losing half a day's worth of work due to a server problem (according to his twitter), but my experience was relatively smooth, aside from the awkward "alt-tab for a few minutes and be asked to restart the game" issue.
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It seems to me the criticisms people are having are a combination of bugs, poor design decisions, and not really "getting" the way the game is intended to work, and people aren't always distinguishing between them well.
Note that I haven't actually played the game yet. That's just the impression I get from reviews, previews, and commentary others have made.-
Anytime a franchise takes a decade off (and I think most people are happy to ignore the existence of SimCity Societies), I think it's natural for people to expect something substantially bigger and better than what came before, and for better or for worse, SimCity isn't really a game with a much grander scope than SimCity 4. It's still really good, but it's not a huge step forward for the series.
And yeah, there are definitely some items in the game that I would consider bugs or missing features that the devs probably consider "working as intended." The lack of terraforming is especially annoying, since any plot you build on that has a hill in it is going to have a decent percentage less land to actually build on, and when you consider that the plots are already small to begin with, choosing a plot with hills or a lot of water feels really inefficient.
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Kyle: Also, would it kill them to have subways? Streetcars are nice, but...
Peter: Or anything that allows transport without taking up gobs of space on the surface.
I find it ironic that there are no subways.
Kyle: Yeah, next time I am building no streets, because avenues are just tons better.
Haljackey from the video I posted touches on this issue.
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It's...different, and I think time will have to bear that out based on individual preferences. There's certainly no getting around the fact that the cities are much, much smaller than you've been able to make in previous Sims games; the focus on simulating individual members of the population means that you're capped out at a few hundred thousand people max, rather than the millions and millions of people that you could have in previous games.
I still found it to have enough options to keep me interested for a couple dozen hours of game, although again, I didn't run into any of the truly disastrous bugs that some other reviewers have been encountering, despite playing it for multiple hours on two different machines. -
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Just to clarify the end text here: I played the game for around six hours at EA's office on Thursday, but also received an Origin login that allowed me to play the game from home over the weekend, where I spent the bulk of my in-game time. I didn't run into any major issues with the always-on connection requirement, but where I did I noted them in the review.
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Yeah, overall the game is one of the less-annoying in terms of up-front microtransaction requests, in that there really isn't a huge amount of first-day DLC content waiting in the wings. I have a feeling that Maxis is going to push for stuff packs and expansions like they did with The Sims rather than tiny DLCs. It's too bad that making the city plots bigger is almost certainly going to be something you'll have to pay for, though.
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I watched this the other day (4 parts)
http://www.twitch.tv/haljackey/b/372077242
I thought the small map size was bad, but I didn't think it was going to be that bad. -
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No, the game only ships with eight regions and they are not editable.
A list: http://www.ign.com/wikis/simcity/Regions
I would expect to see more regions downloadable in the future and hopefully a utility to make them, but we will see. Since this is EA I would not be surprised if you would have to pay for more regions. -
Hmm, definitely not the case for me. There are something like 10 different zones with anywhere from 2 to 16 individual plots for cities in each one. There's a decent amount of options between the individual plots, but again, some of them seem to be objectively worse for city-building than others. (I hate you, hills!)
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In theory, but the city plots are still in pockets and spread apart around the various regions, you can't control where the plots are situated nor build anything outside of the city borders on the empty region itself. It's all predetermined and the same for everyone.
So you can't for example fake a larger city or some sprawl by placing multiple cities right next to each other.-
I imagine most people are probably going to play 16/4 region, solo/private, to get access to the 4 great works. But with only 10 save game slots, I wonder how that is going to work out.
This seems really... odd... to limit things so much, and to rather "force" the architecture into multiplayer, kinda like forcing multiplayer onto Mass Effect... :|
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Official forum EXPLODING over inconsistent refunds:
http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9338300.page
some people getting refunds, posting their live support chat logs, while others get threatened with bans:
http://i.imgur.com/K3KFAI3.jpg
Their tears are delicious :3 -
It sounds like the fans don't think highly of SC 5 (Meta score of 2):
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/simcity -
Always online is just so horrible idea. Especially with a company like Electronic Arts who will anyway close the servers inside 2-3 years and then nobody will be able to play even the single player ever again.
No EA games ever for me then in the future.
Was thinking about buying this, but always online drm is just a straight no for me.
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