"Maxis really missed the big picture"

When you look at my score of 3 you might think that I am crazy. I am sure by now you have seen screen shots and think that this game looks fantastic. Don't worry I was that easily fooled too. I have played every one of Maxis's Sim games and I have seen a range of legendary games to god awful games, trust me this isn't the worst but it is far from the best. Let me explain why.

Graphics 10/10-Ah the graphics let me just say that these are by far the best graphics I have ever seen on any Maxis game ever made or just about any game for that matter. These are a far improvement from SimCity 3000's cartoon like graphics. The detail is incredible. No longer when you zoom in do things get blurry, you can now see each individual Sim and what they are doing, such as opening doors and windows or just walking down the street. Another improvement that I found from going from SimCity 3000 to SimCity 4 is that they your buildings no longer turn into little gray squares when ever you zoom in or out, let me tell you that is one of the things I like the most about this game. One thing that helps this game look so realistic is how proportioned everything is. If you have a sky scraper next to a two story house, the house is much smaller compared to the skyscraper unlike in SimCity 3000. The best new feature of SimCity 4's graphics is night time. The first time I saw the game in night mode I was speechless, everything looked perfect, even things like the lights in windows looked great. Although the graphics are great in this SimCity 4, I do not believe they saved the game. So with that let’s talk about....

Game play 2/10-This is the worst part of SimCity 4 and the thing that turned me off from this game forever, so pay attention. Let’s start with the controls. As a seasoned SimCity fan I was shocked to find out that the controls are no longer how they were from the last 3 SimCity games, they are now like that of my most hated game, The Sims. Instead of the buttons being organized by the type of building they make, such as fire, police, and parks were under ''Civic Buildings'' in SimCity 3000, they are now everywhere. Don’t think that you can just buy a police station or hospital any more; you have to pick what type of police station you want, so how do you know which one to pick? You don’t know. Well you will know what you should have picked when you lose all of your money and everyone moves away. If you think that would be confusing, just wait because it gets worse. The budget in this game is one of the most stressful aspects of SimCity 4. You will rip your hair out trying to balance this budget. I know what you are thinking, I did it in the last three SimCity games so I can do it on this one too, well you’re WRONG! There is a major change with the budget from the last versions to this version. Instead of paying your bills at the beginning of the year you do it every month, translated into regular time that means about once every 30 seconds. So instead of losing, say, $6000 once a year, which wasn’t too bad in previous versions, you will lose $6000 12 times a year. And trust me you will lose $6000 a month. There are four ways to stop a budget crisis. The first way is to raise or lower taxes. There is a problem with that, instead of being able to jump from 7% to 8% you jump from 7% to 7.1% then 7.2% so on and so forth. The hard thing with fine tuning the taxes is that your Sims may be ok with 7.1% but they will freak if taxes are at 7.2%. Taxes also have less of an impact than before. If they were at 9% in SimCity 3000 then you would most likely have a large surplus, people wouldn’t like it but you would have a lot of money. In SimCity 4, however, 9% won’t get you far but the Sims still freak anyway. Your second way to fix your budget is to adjust funding to police, fire, schools ect. But instead of adjusting the funding for all of the schools in your city, you have to adjust it for every individual school, which of course will take forever with all your public building you have to put in. The third way to get more money is to make a deal with a neighbor. The good news in this game is that you can make the deal instead of waiting for your neighbor to offer. The bad news is you have to build neighboring cities also. Infact you have to build every city in the entire game because Maxis didn’t include any premade cities. The final way you can balance your budget is to make a business deal, such as letting the military put a base in your city. The problem with this is by the time you are offered a business deal you will be so far into debt it won’t even matter. A few other problems with this game is the zoom time which take about 5 times longer than in other SimCity games, scroll time is longer, and news ticker is no longer humorous and easy to understand, it says things like “Mayor rocks the block” and “Sims celebrate placing of new electrical distribution system”.

Sound 7/10- The sound in this game has its ups and downs. Although most of the time the sound effects are pretty good, they do skip sometimes. The music is what bothers me. It really isn’t the Big Band style music I am used to with the other SimCity games, it is more vocal but without singing, kind of like in a church. I recommend turning the music off.

Play Time/Replayability 5/10- This one really depends on how committed you are to this game. If you want to build a small town with a stable budget is you are going to have a lot of “play time”. If you are going to try and build dozens of cities to make the game complete, all I can say is get very used to sitting in front of a computer all day. As for replayability I know in my case I played for about and hour then I apologized to my copy of SimCity 3000 and begged it to give me another chance. Since then I have tried played it a few times but each time I remember why I never got attached to it.

Buy or Rent-. I say if you can know of a place that actually rents computer games and you really want to try SimCity 4then I say go for it, maybe you will see something I didn’t. As for buying, don’t waste your money. If you get it as a gift, don’t open the box because after that it will never go away.

In conclusion, I think that Maxis really dropped the ball on this one. They tried to make SimCity 4 too much like the Sims and they tried to make it more realistic by making it so complex. The unfortunate thing is they spent too much time focusing on the small details, that they missed the big picture.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/03