Streets of SimCity

"Gah!!! What the hell were they thinking at maxis?!"

This was quite a unique game for its time. Released in 1997, Streets of SimCity was one of the first games (if not the first) to have a full three dimensional city to drive around in. Although not pretty, it did the job for me until 1999 when Driver came out. At the time, I thought it was the best game I had ever owned. The cars had supposed “real time” damage and lots of little frills and gimmicks to entice you. There was also the choice of what you wanted your car to look like. You could change anything from the color of the car to the tread-type on your tires. Also, being the imaginative teen I was, I would recreate my favorite episodes of televisions shows I had seen with imaginary characters and cop chases. It truly was a blast for me to play back then. But I’ve grown up and I have cast a different eye to it. Compared to newer games, this is truly inferior to anything after it.

Lets start off with gameplay. There really isn’t too much to accomplish in this game. The core mode is set up like a TV station and you have 5 shows that you can act out. Each show pits you in a different car ranging from a Volkswagen Beetle look-alike to a Delivery van. With these cars, you ensue in a battle royale against a bunch of other cars that are trying to destroy you or keep you from succeeding in your objective. It’s basically adding 5 corny stories to Twisted Metal, slapping together cities in SimCity 2000, loading them into this game and calling it “streets of Sim city”. Most of the weapons bland car mounted machine guns or little missiles that shoot forward out of your car, or some other sort of little gizmo or gadget to kill your enemies. Problem is, they’re all pretty much straight shooting weapons, meaning you pretty much have to be going head on into the opposition or chasing them. These situations greatly risk damaging your cars, and trust me, even with the armor, these cars go up in smoke faster than you can say “whoa, this game sucks” if you get hit. This causes frustration, frustration leads to anger, anger leads to stress, stress leads to gray hair and heart attacks. Therefore, I say this game gives you gray hair and heart attacks! That’s just the core of the game, there is another mode to be played.

If you get bored with the story telling part of the game, you can always cruise around the city in the free ride mode. You can choose between 5 levels of difficulty. The easiest being no bad guys to shoot up, and the farther you go into it, the more enemies there are. You can then pick any one of the fifty-plus cities in this game and take a ride around the cities. It’s always fun to just cruise around and get the layout of the city before barreling headlong into the normal gameplay mode. This mode also lets you get acquainted with the weapons and gadgets you can put on your car. One of the gadgets that I find truly awesome are the hovering wheels. It uses up your gas considerably faster than driving, but you actually float above the ground. It really helps when you are in a level with a lot of water. There are also 2 levels or armor and countless other things that give you a slight edge on your opponents. In the weapons, you have car mounted machine guns, little rockets, smoke machines and oil slicks that you can strap onto your car. I’ve already pointed this out, but I find that these free ride games are quite boring when compared to Twisted Metal. It’s basically the same game sans humorous cars and creative weapons.

The visuals of this game are no eye opener either. Just think of it as SimCity 2000 from the perspective of a car. The buildings do have a few details, but nothing worth getting excited about. Most buildings are maybe 3 colors max, so its kind of hard to get immersed in the realism of a 3 color section of the city. Some things that I found quite well done though were things like bridges and railways. They actually do look realistic (for a game of its age). The one thing about the cities that makes me want to pull out my hair are the STRAIGHT corners. There are no soft corners, no S turns. No winding highway roads that curve to keep your car on the road. No sir. Every single turn in this game is 90 degrees. That’s right. These guys expect you to actually do races on these awful roads. I just cannot believe that they neglected… or were just too lazy to make the corners a little more rounded. It really limits your driving capabilities too. Oh well, just another nail in this games coffin. The cars look okay… well not really but hey, at least they look roughly like cars. They also included an in-car camera so you can drive from inside the car, which I always like in driving games. But that’s really where the buck stops. Once you drive the car into something like a building or a tree, the cars look absolutely god-awful. You could be driving head first into a tree, and the front is fine while the rear end is crumpled up. I don’t know who the idiot was that worked on the collision detection system, but he sure did a despicable job. The damage doesn’t look too realistic either. The body of the car never really changes shape, its just sort of made to look like its crumpled and junky. If visuals are what you’re looking for, keep looking.

Sound. Oh god, please don’t get me started on sound. Even the muscle car in this game sounds like an underpowered dying taxi. The only car that sounds even remotely like its real life counterpart is that Volkswagen Beetle look-alike. The van sounds nothing like it should. It sounds more like one of those unimogs they use in the military than a delivery van. The british sports car sounds like… well, put bluntly… crap. The pro street Chevelle looking car that grandma drives also sounds similar to the kinds of noises a car made on the original Nintendo. I cannot believe how awful these sounds were. But if you thought the cars sounded bad, the radio is 10 times worse. The music doesn’t really fit into any genre of music, except for maybe the annoying country you hear all through the game. And the Disk Jockey... Don’t even get me started on that guy. If I could strangle any person and get away with it, it would be the guy who did the voice for the DJ in Streets of SimCity. He sounds like he’s trying to impersonate a southerner and it makes me want to pull my hair out. If you’re like me, you will turn off the radio in the game and maybe turn on your own radio or play a CD or whatever. Of the many flaws in this game, this one has to take the award for biggest turn off.

Another frustrating element in this game is the controls. I’ll try and put this as nicely as I can. THEY SUCK. Depending on the speed of your computer, the controls will either be too sluggish to play if your computer is too slow, or the controls will be extremely tight if your computer exceeds the system requirements by a lot. Either way, you will find yourself grinding your teeth and getting unnecessary headaches trying to figure out a way to get the cars to handle properly.

You ask, is this game difficult? Yes. But only the circumstances you play under make it difficult. I’ll explain. I’m pretty sure if this game were to have more realistic physics, better collision detection, better graphics and a soundtrack that did not drive you nuts, this game would quite easy. But it isn’t. Often, you’re ground to a hault if you crash into a tree or miss one of those 90 degree corners, and it costs you either valuable armor or the race (if you’re in a race). You basically have to drive and think perfectly to get anywhere in the game. If you don’t, then you basically do not advance.

Replay Value? Ha ha ha, are you kidding me? What kind of person would want to play this game once, never mind twice! Trust me. By the time you finish this game (if you finish it at all) You’ll want to uninstall it and snap the disk.

Please… Do NOT buy this game. If you are looking for a game that is similar to this, try Driver, or Twisted Metal. I don’t care how cheap this game is when you find it. DO NOT BUY IT. It’s quite possibly the lowest quality game in the Sim game lineup since the early Sim Earth. I would only suggest buying this game if you are a diehard fan of the Sim series… but even then, a diehard fan like myself probably wouldn’t even be impressed by this game.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/19/03, Updated 03/19/03