SimCity 4: Rush Hour

"The magic of Simcity is perfected"

Various games, such as Simcopter and streets of Simcity have tried and failed. Those games were fun but just couldn't make it. With the Rush Hour expansion pack for Simcity 4 you can perfectly interact with your own city.

Haven't read a Simcity 4 review yet, then I'll first give you a short introduction.
---Simcity 4 is the newest game in the legendary Simcity series. Not much has changed to the other games as for the gameplay except for one very big change: the region. In Simcity 3000 you had 4 neighbour cities that could provide you with, or buy from you electricity, trash and water and you could set up a (rail)road network to improve your bussiness. But you couldn't really interact with those cities and it didn't really work that well. In simcity 4 you get a huge region, divided into a lot of cities. You can build a lot of cities and interact with you own other cities. This makes mayoring your city(/ies) much more interesting and also easier. For example now you can build one residental city, one commercial city and one industrial city and link them to eachother. Simcity 4 is a great new part of the SimCity series.---

Every single vehicle that appears in your city is driveable. You can also do missions with all these vehicles. Not only is it fun, but also helpfull. One of the biggest problems you always encounter in Simcity is making a good infrastructure. Because now you can drive through your own city, it is easier for you to see what to change. Plus, now you must make a good infrastructure not only for your own mayor rating but also to decently do your missions.

It can be very helpfull that when driving cars you can automatically stay on the road, so that you only have to give the direction. Especially heplfull when you have a slow computer and the game doesn't run very smoothly.

When doing a mission, normally you have two options. Use the vehicle for a good mission and get a better mayor rating or do an evil mission and get a lot of money. Easy when you need some bucks or when you're rating is very low.

New are the monorail and the high railway. Either one works good for long distance public transport, just like the subway but a lot cheaper. Also new is the mainroad (Don't be mad if you don't know what I'm talking about. I'm dutch so I don't know the English ingame translation for ''hoofdstraat'') wich works as a good alternative for the highway.

One minus to the game though, it was allready in Simcity 4 but they should have changed it, is that sometimes you can't always link the roads to eachother in a way you want it. Something to work on in Simcity 5.

Overall this game is great. Simcity is now almost perfected. Thank you EA.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/18/03