"Hopefully Patches can save this Game"

Introduction:

Wow. I truely did not expect this at all. All the screenshots looked so promising, all the hype seemed so true. However the hype does not live up to the game as you will soon see.

Graphics:

All I can say is beautiful. Well, thats not all I can say. The graphcis even at the lowest quality settings are spectacular and a definite improvement over Simcity 3000 and a very LARGE improvement over Simcity 2000.
When you've built your own little community, you can actually zoom in (to maximum zoom level) and see individual ''Sims'' go outside and begin speaking with each other, or when you've built roads you can actually see the roads being built (Though the animation is very simple: A truck comes, a person hops out and begins to build the road. It takes about 3 seconds). However the level of detail in the graphics can sometimes, at least in my opinion, detract from the game. How is this possible? Well.....
In previous Simcity games, I could zone a large or small section of residential zone (It didnt really matter) and once I've hooked up all the required prerequistes to it, I would soon see at LEAST 9 houses (On a 3x3 zone). You could create huge blocks of residential zone and would quickly see houses begin to pop up. However this is not the case with Simcity 4...Yes, houses will begin to appear (or rather, pop up) out of the ground, however a 9x9 tile only produces at maximum, 3 houses which usually look completly identicle. This does take away from the City-building feel as theres just a lot of empty space and where there isn't empty space there are sets of houses that look exactly alike....I would at the very least like a neighborhood to have different houses.
Another graphical quirk I have is with the roads. When I set road, I would like it to IMMEDIATELY be built. However due to the animation that goes on, its built much more slowly for no apparent reason. Both of these are minor, to be sure, however I believe that they must be calculated as I am reviewing the game as a whole, not simply the best parts of it.
Barring these two examples though everything as I have stated before is BEAUTIFUL. I love the lightening (a new disaster) effects as once you push the button to set one off, instantly theres a roar of thunder as the electric rod makes contact with a structure and instantly the affected building begins to smoke up with fire. Then watching the fire department actually make a drive downtown (assuming you aren't heavily congested with traffic) is a spectacular site.

Graphics, overall, gets a 93/100

Sound and Music:

Because of the heavy requirements, I was forced to disable sound. Therefore unfortunately I will not give it a score.

Gameplay:

Simcity, though now very limited by our standards, was a revolutionary game. To be able to build your own city was a concept that was now even heard of until its release. Simcity 2000 expanded on this and added a much higher level of detail. You now had more buildings to build (and deal with!), new disasters, and updated graphics. Simcity 3000 was disappointing however because though it added the concept of trade with other cities and petitioners, neither of the two were enough to change the game and expand it even more than Simcity2000 did with Simcity. And unfortunately Simcity 4 had decided to repeat this unfortunate event as while it takes 3 steps foward, it takes 5 steps backward.
Blasphemy! Surely Simcity 4, with its superior graphics and such would easily triumph over all other Simcities, wouldn't it? No...This game, to be quite frank, is incomplete. There are several incomplete concepts lying all over. One of them which had very big potential is the ''MySim'' concept (Which undoubtedly was created in order to joke users into buying the exceptional The Sims series). In the current unpatched version of Simcity 4 you can import one of your own Sims (or one of the premade ones included with the game), pick a house for him, and then he or she will begin to feed information directly to you about your city. However, this is ALL he does. Simcity 4 does not take into account his interests, personality, age, marital status....Nothing. They simply pretend like their in your city and tell you that the commute is too long or that they can't find their job following an earthquake. Why? Why can it not take into account that my sim ''Tassadar'' has top physical skill but is intellectually stupid and expand on that? Or that Bob is married and in the military? In fact, your sim seems to LOSE his occupation as you import him and instead takes on one in the city and while that is all fine and dandy if you dont happen to have a computer center or a military base however a sim you've trained to become a certain occupation..Maybe after making your sim a recruit in the army you increased his physical skill greatly? Well after importing him he may become a clerk at a supermarket. How unfortunate.
There are also several other seemingly small things however they all quickly add up. Another example? Zoning and auto-roads. When you attempt to zone a large area, you will begin to note that roads...or to be more specific, streets, are appearing and when you lay it, sure enough, there are streets there. This causes two problems: The first being wasted space. Sometimes I just dont want a street there at all. Maybe I've already set down roads and am planning on filling, say, a 1x3 space (with a 1x1 space over 2 tiles away) to fill in a bit of residential zone. Well suddenly it will begin to zone streets for me as well. Then I must demolish these. While this sounds simple, it happens quite often and can quickly beome tedious. Another problem is: It zones STREETS instead of the higher-quality-and-standard ROADS. Once this occours I must zone OVER the streets with roads (Which costs extra money by the way) and if I'm zoning a large bit of land, this QUICKLY becomes tedious.
Roads also serve another tedious design mistake: If you have two bits of road that you want to unite, you can't zone roads between them....You are forced to connect them to the road you just made. Again this sounds simple, and it is however this takes time and it takes time to scroll and its tedious. The roads should connect automatically like they've done since Simcity 2000. Another small thing is: Simcity 4 tries to make buildings go to correct oreintation when you attempt to build them connecting to a road (So that the entrance actually faces the road) however it does fail and this would not be a bad thing the game actually takes up more tiles to attempt to do this (presumably for ''parking space''.). This quite simply is not required and looks QUITE ugly. There are many more little annoyances I could write about however the review is getting a tad long and I will teriminate here.
Moving on, the high requirements are yet another reason not to get this game. While the Sys Requirements on the box seem relatively low, in order to have an enjoyable experience you must have a a computer of at least 2.5 Gigahertz and 512 MB of RAM. Scrolling takes huge amounts of time, zooming (which often occours when you click on a simple link) takes LARGE amounts of time. Loading the game takes large amounts of time. Exiting takes large amounts of time. Going to the regional view screen takes large amounts of time. And the game is also very buggy: You must save often as it can crash to the desktop at any moment. Problems I've experienced go from freezes to illegal errors to a problem with my screen only displaying verticle lines to blue screens of death....You face this risk every time you build a buidling, save, go to the regional screen, exit, or enter. A game simply needs to be much more stable than Simcity 4 is at right now.
However not all is bad....It does faithfully reproduce the city-building element that the other Simcities captured and executes several improvements including ''class taxing'' where you can tax a certain amount to certain classes (Poor, Medium, Rich) and the monuments included with the game are beautifully rendered (Especially Saint Basils Cathedral from Moscow, Russia).

Buy or Bust?

I have to say this game is a BUST. No pre-made cities are included, online play is not functional, the tedium in the game is to a level which I have never seen in a Sim game, it has massive stability issues....If you are considering this game, I would wait till there are patches out which solve these problems and the price drops considerably (From the fifty which I purcahsed it at). If you are simply impatient, I must recommend that you buy another game such as Simcity 3000 (While it is simply a graphical upgrade of Simcity 2000, the price of 10.00 is very difficult to beat and should definately be bought simply for that reason) or another game such as Rise of Nations (to come out soon, promises to be a nice empire building game) or a game such as Caesar 3 which is an excellent city-building game on par with Simcity.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/26/03, Updated 01/26/03