"It could have been great...."

For reference, this is being written only a week or so after SimCity 4 came out. So it's possible that future patches, etc, etc will take care of some of the issues I'm going to gripe about.

SimCity is latest generation of the SimCity franchise, a series of games with a proud history and legacy. The brainchild of Will Wright, creator The Sims and many of the other Sim games.

Where to start...... first of all, I'll go over the improvements and changes from previous versions of the game.

Graphics:

The graphics have been very nicely updated for this version of SimCity. There's more detail, smoother textures, and more movement going on in the city than ever before. It seems to me that it doesn't have as much color as SimCity 3000 did but the upshot of this is that SimCity 4 portrays an *real* city much more authentically. When you zoom in at the closest level you can see nicely detailed cars, people, and construction machinery going about its business in the city.

Also, for the first time ever your cities will graphically follow a day/night cycle. At night the sky gets dark and the lights go on. The lighting affects are pretty good but perhaps the coolest part is that you can see your city wind down for the night as your citizens go home and go to bed. It adds nicely to the affect of a living, breathing city. Bushes, trees, water, sky, etc all look markedly improved from SimCity 3000.

Overall, I'd give the graphics a 9/10.

Sound: This is the area in which I think I was most impressed with SimCity 4. The sounds of the hustle and bustle of a modern city are all over. You can hear traffic, walking, road construction, everything. The sounds themselves are crisp and nice. I especially liked the sound of my roads being constructed.

Overall, I'd give the sound 9/10 as well.

Music: I've never been a big fan of the *type* of music they put into the SimCity games but that doesn't mean it isn't very good for what it is. The music never gets in the way of the rest of the game and the selection of tunes fits the mood well. Some of it grated on my ears however and seemed rather jarring. For me personally, the music didn't make much difference to my enjoyment of the game. You can also import your own tunes in MP3 format into the game. This is a very good feature and one I hope more games take up.

Overall, I'd give the music 8/10.

Control: Here is where my complaints start. Control in SimCity 4 isn't bad necessarily but it does leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. Even at the fastest scrolling speed the screen scrolls too slowly to suit me. Also, the cursor is a big too big and gets in the way at times.

By the far the most annoying control issue I have is the creation of zones. Anytime you make a zone (other than agricultural) the game automatically builds streets for you in a pre-prescribed pattern. Maybe it's just the control freak in me but that drives me nuts. Also, there's no way to turn it off if I want to do my own zoning withour streets. Plus then it forces me to go back over all the streets again with roads (there is actually a difference between streets and roads in this game, something else I didn't understand) which takes time I'd rather spend doing something else.

The placing of buildings, etc, etc is just as simple as in the other games, which is good. One feature I quite liked was the ability to auto bulldoze existing development and put in a building or roads without having to clear a path first.

I'd give the control 5/10.

Features:

What I mean by features are bells and whistles, additions, and improvements (or unimprvements) from previous games.

SimCity 4 adds a significant amount of new features into the game, most of which are welcome. However, inexplicably they have removed some things from previous games that I felt were valuable. Also, there are some very glaring omissions in the game that simply should have been there at release time.

One feature that can be useful or annoying, depending on how you see it is the ability to control local funding of buildings such as schools, police, and hospitals. By micromanaging your funding locally you can create significant savings. With a very large city this becomes impractical but at that point you can always just leave the funding at 100% and everything should be fine.

The MySim feature allows you to take a Sim (those little dudes from the The Sims) and stick them into your city. They will report on local conditions in the city, how their life is going, etc, etc. This can provide you with valuable local information. On the other hand, the constant flood data can get aggrivating. But then you can always evict the Sims too. I can't help but feel this feature could have been much, much more but it serves its purpose decently.

Probably the biggest change is the Region. Instead of just having one city surrounded by other computer controlled ones you now have control over an entire region. You can build over a dozen seperate cities that will all interact with one another economically. This gives you greater control on what *kind* of metropolis you create. You can have an industrial town, a bedroom community, or a commerical hub all in different cities in the same region.

There are a bunch of other little features such as greater taxing micromanagement, public utilties/services funding management, and the ability to initiate neighbor deals.

I'd the the features 8/10.

Spit and Polish and Performance:

In this category I'm talking about all the miscellaneous stuff I couldn't categorize earlier. This is also the section that contains most of my criticisms. Keep in mind that depending on your computer configuration and personal opinion your mileage may vary.

After playing the game for a good long while I can't help but get the nagging feeling that this game was rushed out the door before it was really finished. I also felt that was the case with SimCity 3000 but this is much worse.

First of all, all the funny little things and cutesy touches that graced previous SimCity games seem to be almost gone. Maxis' wry sense of humor seems to have been washed out of this game. This gives one the impression of much more Spartan, though realistic existence. I miss the petitoners for one thing as well as the funny little news stories (there are some in this game but not nearly as many). I get the impression that Maxis is being given less freedom as a subsidiary of Electronic Arts than it previously was. It has the realistic blandness of EA (note that I think EA makes some really great games) which was a dissapointment.

Secondly, and most importantly is the performance of the game. I have a pretty beefy system but SimCity 4 just slows the hell out of it. This game is a ridiculously bad system resource hog. Go and read the review of this game on IGN where the reviewer says he has problems running it on a 1.8 Ghz system with 512 MB of memory and a GeForce 4 card. I think you'd need a cray to really run this thing smoothly when you city gets big. This slowdown in rendering and movement really detracts from the overall fun of the game, in my opinion.

SimCity 4 is also not as stable as its prececessors. It has a bad habit of crashing or freezing up the system completely. It's not as bad as Fallout 2 but it should be more stable than this, period.

Everything takes forever in this game, it seems. Loading up the game, saving the game, exiting to the region map, everything seems to be slow and plodding.

Perhaps the most glaring omission is that no kind comprehensive city or building editor is available. Sure, you can do some pretty interesting things to your city in God Mode but not as finely as I would have liked. Also, your options in making the regions are pathetic. You can either have all water or all flat land, that's it. You can't create rivers, oceans, mountain ranges, nada on a regionwide scale. This is simply not acceptable.

Last but not least: No online play. Every game nowadays has a multiplayer component and not putting this feature into SimCity 4 seems very odd. In all fairness however, SimCity does not lend itself to competitive play so I'm not sure how Maxis *would* implement online play. Still, the lack of it is noticeable.

Overall, on the spit and polish I would give the game 4/10.

So why my overall score of 7? Two reasons:

First, most if not all of the problems I bitched about earlier can be fixed via patches and downloads from EA. And I think that patches will be forthcoming, if slowly.

Second, it really is a good evolutionary step in the series. It builds on the successes of earlier games and tosses out some of their most annoying errors.

My reccomendation as of mid January 2003 would be to wait a couple of months and buy the game once some of the bugs are worked out and more FAQs are available to help you out. This game is hard, believe me. Or if you're going to get a new computer soon you might want to wait until you get that. This same is a resource hog.

Thanks for reading and have fun!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/25/03, Updated 01/25/03