"Plenty of new twists, but also plenty of new annoyances"

SimCity 4 greatly modifies the SimCity experience (for those playing along at home: build a virtual city) in two ways: by allowing construction on hills and by giving the player control over all of the cities in a region, not just one. Outside of those two issues, the game plays much like SimCity 3000 with a new coat of paint and more mandatory buildings to build. Oh, and a host of new annoyances that rear their ugly heads every time it seems like the game is as much fun as its predecessors.

By allowing hillside construction, the game significantly reduces the amount of wasted space and, for small buildings and gentle hills, creates a nice visual experience. Placing a larger building on the side of the hill, on the other hand, often leads to an ugly effect in which there is a sheer wall between it and the next building or street. A bigger issue is the fact that, by allowing buildings to be placed on all but the steepest of grades, Simcity 4 makes differences in terrain between cities almost completely irrelevant.

Here I should point out that the game now builds city streets automatically. The tediousness of zoning large swaths of land was SimCity 3000's biggest flaw, but the maps are so much smaller this time around that it simply isn't an issue anymore. Sure, zoning large areas is very easy, but the game can waste a frightful amount of space with poor city street placement if you're not careful. Although there is now a difference between city streets and major roads, it is almost a requirement in a successful city that all of the streets by replaced by roads.

Further limiting city construction is the fact that city sizes are much smaller than they were in the previous game, and the smallest plots are downright tiny. Region play somewhat makes up for this, however, so it's in some ways like having one giant city. Demand is transferred across cities in the region, so it is possible to build cities composed exclusively of a single type of zone. Better still is the fact that neighbor deals are very easy to set up (and, annoyingly, just as easy to break by accident). This is mostly useful for getting rid of garbage and keeping power plant-related pollution out of residential and commercial cities (good luck unlocking any of the non-polluting power plants). I do wish that they had included the ability to simply donate funds from one city to another, but it's not as though this system doesn't allow for enough abuse already.

Indeed, everything in SimCity 4 seems very expensive. The budget is settled monthly rather than yearly, and nearly everything has a monthly fee associated with it. Certain buildings can even be adjusted on an individual basis, which is quite nice when placing, say, a school in an area that has some students but not necessarily enough to fill the school to capacity. Budget management has a maddening complication in that the game determines an average funding level based on the funding of individual buildings, so lowering the funding of a power plant will also cut funding to power lines. Water can only be managed as a whole, which is entirely worthless; reducing water funding causes pipes to burst with impressive frequency.

Yes, even most of the “rewards” cost money. Landmarks (which were free in the previous game) are ridiculously expensive to build and frighteningly expensive to maintain, making them effectively useless this time around. Despite how I may have made it seem, balancing the budget of most cities is fairly easy, which is nice given that there are no useful money cheats this time around. Tax-management is finally sane (at last!), although I do miss the ludicrous amounts of money that large cities could generate in the previous game.

It should by this point be clear that the game is filled with minor issues that add up to an overall obnoxious experience. For example, this is the first SimCity game that does not include the ability to disable disasters. Although most of the disasters are only available when triggered manually, the game basically bribes the player to build a complete system of fire stations by starting fires in areas that are unprotected. This provides an incentive to do so not because fires do damage (indeed, I've never once seen a building destroyed by one) but because a fire interrupts the flow of the game. It's little more than institutional bribery.

Bribery is all over the place. Not only in requiring complete fire coverage or making it impossible to save on the water budget, but in that teachers and doctors go on strike when their respective buildings are underfunded. This is yet another way to interrupt the flow of the game, because it simply isn't possible to devote enough attention to the funding levels of all of these buildings in a growing city. I simply wait for the game to alert me of a strike, raise the funding to the maximum (which must be done to end the strike) and then set it to the appropriate level. An interesting twist is that hospitals and schools now have a transportation budget. Lowering this will decrease the coverage area , but raising it does nothing at all.

The designers seem to have been working against themselves at every turn. The buildings all look very nice, for example, but the game seems to enjoy putting them in a decaying state (without offering an explanation, of course), and completely abandoned buildings (especially in industrial zones) often sit in that state until cleared manually. This is certainly an attempt to add more “realism” to the game, but the decaying buildings look far uglier than most any buildings I've ever seen. A nice touch is that buildings of all shapes and sizes are included. Airports, for example, are truly huge, and quite a few of the buildings are rectangular rather than square. The game tends to do a good job in keeping that large, bustling cities look quite different from sleepy little hamlets. Not that it's much fun to build sleepy little hamlets anyway, as the game's reliance on buildings with a radius of influence can make small towns prohibitively expensive.

The default region isn't bad, but creating an entire region from scratch requires more time than anyone with any obligations at all could ever muster. Maxis does almost make up for that by offering a tool (downloaded from simcity.com) to generate regions from real world terrain.

Here is SimCity 4 in a nutshell: the game includes a San Francisco Bay Area region, but it is impossible to build an accurate Bay Bridge. Maxis has put all sorts of interesting features into this game, but many of them end up being implemented in ways that harm the experience where it could have been improved. No matter how nice it looks, the game is often more annoying and therefore less fun than its predecessors by a wide margin. Surely the developers should have realized this while they were putting everything together.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/21/04