"Bulid a world class city. What more can I say?"

I can remember few years ago, I came home with Simcity 3000. That game sure was addictive and very fun. But I was never good at it and I soon gave up.

Fast forward back to the present and Simcity 4 is out. This game has better graphics with 3D buildings and contains much more detail than ever before. Every little Sim wakes up in the morning and drives to work and you can just sit back and see them get stuck in traffic jams.

Graphics 10/10
The graphics are just brilliant. As I've said before, every little Sim walks around in their life. There is tons of detail everywhere. Build a skatepark and see kids skating. Build a football pitch and see everyone play football.
When you build roads, you see men in trucks come in and start building the road. Even though they don't really do much it makes the game just seem just that little more realistic than magical roads just falling from the sky.
When you zoom in to the max, you just see how nice the graphics are. Everything is nice and sharp and it looks beautiful.
Speaking about beauty, the day to night effects look great. You can slowly see the sky go dark and then bright again and in between them you see dusk and dawn. Looks great. Sometimes I just keep it on at night all the time because it looks so good with the lights.
Disasters look great as well. When you make a volcano in the middle of the city, you see your buildings just collapse and fall and then disappears. When lightning strikes, it looks brilliant with the flashing.
One thing that was annoying though was that I couldn't see my city very well because of a huge fog cloud above my power stations due to pollution. My fault really but a nice touch I think.
I'll stop about the graphics now but it looks great. Just make sure you have a good PC. Mine lags a bit when I have too many people on or the graphics turned up too high. But I just don't care sometimes and turn it right up.

Sounds and Music 8/10
I don't really like the music. I can't really remember it now anymore but I remember not liking it. But if you do really hate them, you can put your own music on to it.
The sound however isn’t bad, query a University and you might hear school bells and schoolchildren talking. A traffic jam? Oh look everyone’s honking.

Gameplay 10/10
Well this bit is the best part. You have complete control over your city. 3 modes to play in.

God Mode: This is where you can sculpt mountains and make craters. Want a huge long and thin mountain next your houses? How about a nice beach next to the power plant? What about a nice and small crater in the middle of everything? This is where you can do anything to the landscape.

Mayor Mode: I think you'll spend the most time here because this is where you actually build your city. You can place roads and then zone the place. Different things happen in different zones. The 3 are residential, commercial and industrial and each one again is separated into another 3. Poor, Medium and Rich. You have to keep your Sims happy I'm afraid and its going to cost you. Hospitals, Schools, Police Stations, Fire Stations. Without them they won't be happy. raise taxes to make more money or lower taxes to get more people to move in. The Sims are very annoying and if you fix one thing then another one soon pops up.

MySim Mode: This is where you can import your own Sim from your ''The Sims'' game and make them live in your city. They will tell you stuff like how the police coverage is and say if there’s anything good or bad.

Controls 9/10
You might be unused to them when you jump here from Simcity 3000, but you get really used to it after a while. The menus like the graphs and areas are on the middle along with the money and charts.

Replay Value and Addictiveness 10/10
This game is so addictive. You just want to go on it forever and design and make your perfect city. Have everything you dream of from small garden parks to the Empire State Building.

Buy or Rent?
BUY!!! This game is really good and addictive.

I would have given this game maybe a 10 if there weren’t so many problems with it when it first came out. But luckily a patch has been released and that’s helped a lot. Also, online play isn’t up yet right now so we won't know what thats going to be like yet. So a final score of

9/10.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/10/03, Updated 02/10/03