[typing]
Well, here it is.
After a decade of waiting, us SimCity fans have finally got what we wanted.
The new flagship game in the SimCity franchise,
simply titled SimCity.
At least you'd THINK it's what we wanted, right?
I mean just look at this cover!
It's got all the SimCity box needs:
a clean-looking logo,
a bunch of sweet buildings,
a UFO hovering over the metropolis
the freaking Maxis logo, and, uh...
[chuckles] Oh, no!
Ah, come on, are you kidding me?
"Persistent Internet connection required to play."
Ugh...
Oh, one might argue that it is a reboot after all.
It's not SimCity 5,
so a few changes are to be expected.
But I am not one to get in the habit
of excusing bad calls on behalf of my fanboyism.
"Explore a world of endless possibilities."
[chuckles]
Ah, "endless."
Innumerable without limitations.
Ah, yeah. We'll come back to that later.
So, you heard me correctly earlier
when I said that SimCity requires an online connection to play.
To even install and start the game,
you need an always-on, stable Internet connection,
so if you're without a decent connection,
for whatever reason,
or just want to play a single-player game
without having to connect to a server,
then tough luck.
Feel free to leave.
For those of you that are still here, let's move on.
Once it's installed and activated
through a mandatory Origin account,
you're greeted with the SimCity launcher.
From here, you'll be able to get updates from Maxis regarding SimCity and
choose a server to start up the game.
At least, in theory,
since at this point it's not uncommon
to run into a bunch of piss-aggravating roadblocks,
where the launcher can't connect to the server to get servers,
or if it can, the servers may just be offine entirely.
Or even worse, they may be busy,
which means you'll have to wait anywhere from ten minutes
to upwards of several hours.
You might think, "well, I'll just move on to another server,
and continue playing while the server I play on is down," right?
Nope.
Not unless you wanna lose all your progress
with regions, cities, achievements, unlocks,
and all saved data in general,
since right now this data is exclusive
to whatever server you started it on.
And the data is not saved on your PC.
It's a mandatory cloud save that happens on its own,
so that's fun.
Anyway, once you finally start the dang thing up,
you're greeted with an intro video
and, of course, the main menu.
From here you can start or continue a city,
change the options,
and browse SimCity World,
which shows off all sorts of online worldwide stats
and challenges regarding the game and its players.
At least, you could if it worked,
and at this point it doesn't whatsoever, so... I...
I really don't know anything about it.
But at least starting a city works!
Most of the time.
You have three choices here:
continuing a previous region,
joining an existing online region,
and starting one of your own.
Joining a game will put you into SimCity's multiplayer mode,
which is the focus of this game,
even though previous SimCity games
have been largely a single-player affair.
Unlike in previous multiplayer SimCity games, though, like Network Edition
where you played as multiple mayors in one city,
here, you're able to play as one or more cities
within someone else's region.
Personally, unless I know the people playing
and trust their judgment with urban planning,
that I don't give a crap about this mode
since objecting myself to greefing or people abandoning their cities
is not something I tend to enjoy.
Starting a new game gives you a choice of eight regions to play in,
each of which has a set number of cities to play within that region.
Though some of the larger ones are appealing,
since that should mean that more cities can work together,
it's almost not worth bothering with them
since some of these are actually just clusters of smaller cities of four
that aren't connected to all the others in the region.
Once you pick one, then you get the choice to name it,
make it playable to anyone who wants to join or by invitation only,
and whether or not you want Sandbox Mode,
which disables achievements and a bunch of other stuff,
but gives you a handful of cheats
and immediately unlocks most everything in-game.
Choose your starting city plot
and assuming the server loads everything properly,
you're free to do whatever your heart desires.
As long as it desires
to start building at a fixed point on the map
where the regional highway enters the city, that is.
Yeah, you can't change this, not without modding the game,
so screw you for desiring choice.
Anyway, at this point it really feels like a SimCity game.
You'll start off laying some roadwork,
some residential, commercial and industrial zones,
placing a power plant and getting some water infrastructure started.
It's not long before zoned areas start turning into construction sites,
which give way to buildings,
and that awesome feeling of having planted seeds
and watching it blossom into something cool
is very much there.
All while some sweet music by Chris Tilton plays in the background,
giving it a feeling of purpose somehow.
[plucky orchestral music plays]
It's much more orchestral than previous SimCity soundtracks
and even gets a bit Philip Glass here and there,
but being a fan of his music on Fringe and many other things,
I think it's pretty awesome.
Not to mention the awesome background noises and city ambience,
which really helps the area feel like a place you could get lost in
and possibly come to love over time.
The awesome new graphics and freely-moveable camera angles
help in the immersion department as well,
and the option tilt-shift effect
gives it an interesting, though potentially tiring, look,
and one that does make it look a bit like a model train set at times.
And since it's more like The Sims,
where you have a day and night cycle instead of dealing with months and years,
watching your city grow is a bit more of an intimate and relatable experience here.
Then you've got the new agents system,
which is something SimCity's Glassbox engine makes possible.
In theory, for the first time, all of the individual Sims
vehicles and resources are actually represented graphically.
It really makes the older games
feel a bit like looking at a spreadsheet in comparison.
I mean, yeah, you can still use the incredibly useful data layers
to judge the state of things,
but even those look better.
And the agents wandering around help visualize things even more.
If you want to, you can zoom in and follow a Sim on their daily routine,
watching them go to work, go shopping,
hit up a ballgame, rob a bank,
get eaten by zombies, whatever.
Though they do seem kind of mindless
and tend to just enter whichever building is closest.
But still, watching everything from the viewpoint
of an eagle flying over the ocean
is awesomely zen-like.
And you can't help but lose massive chunks of time
carefully tailoring things to try and create something beautiful,
even it doesn't seem likely with what you've been given.
It's mesmerizing to watch the resources flow throughout the city
like some kind of urban circulatory system.
The water, sewage and power all run along the roadways,
meaning you don't have to worry about power lines or pipes anymore,
so I hope you weren't too attached to such infrastructure.
The roads also function as the method of adjusting zone density,
with higher-density roads allowing higher-density buildings,
so they're a lot more important than in previous games.
In addition to the agents wandering around,
there are some key changes to the gameplay.
For one thing, we finally get curved roads in a main SimCity game,
so that's cool.
And while the game does a pretty good job
at automatically adjusting the landscape to fit them in,
there is no terraforming in the game whatsoever,
so you're at the mercy of whatever land you're provided.
Ploppable buildings make a return where it makes sense,
with things like power plants, water and sewage treatment facilities,
emergency services, schools, parks and special buildings.
But now you also have the ability to upgrade each building
using a snap-on system similar to Spore's building editor.
This mostly works just fine,
though it can be a pain if you haven't considered
the land around the building when you first plopped it.
It's also a huge pain when the ploppable services just don't work for some reason,
most of which seems to be related to pathfinding.
Since everything is an agent, including things like police cars,
ambulances and garbage trucks,
you have to hope they're smart enough to go where they need to.
To put it lightly, they aren't.
I've watched fire trucks bypass burning buildings
or all crowd around a single building
ignoring others just down the street.
Police cars seemingly get lost in the grid and drive in circles,
garbage trucks take the most inefficient route possible,
and on and on.
It's the same with road and foot traffic in general,
since Sims seem to take a direct, mindless path to wherever they're heading,
ignoring better roads and less-congested routes entirely.
I pretty much just gave up on mass transit efficiency after a while,
since it seems kind of pointless to worry about bus stop placement
when the minds of the bus drivers seemingly left the planet long ago.
The agent problems aren't limited to vehicles either,
since I've had several times where power and water agents
simply don't reach a certain part of the city for no discernible reason whatsoever
due to their random meandering around the grid,
even if you have plenty of excess resources to go around.
If things do happen to work,
you have the option to share resources
with the cities linked to yours,
either via online players or just your other cities
that are in stasis when you're not playing them in the region.
Vehicles also travel between them, along with resources,
so it's quite possible for a deficiency in one city to not be a problem
if another city can provide what you need.
However, a lot of this is limited even further
due to city sizes.
To give you an idea of what you're working with here,
this is an approximation of the largest map size in this new SimCity
versus the largest in SimCity 4.
And yes, I know there are excuses as far as technical limitations to consider,
and the game does slow down a bit with dense cities
on even higher-end systems as it is,
but it would be nice to at least have the option for larger cities
because as it is now, the game just starts getting interesting
when you run out of space.
Supposedly, you can get populations of a million or so in a single city,
but I have yet to see that happen with anyone,
and even if you do,
it doesn't seem that all of those Sims
are actually simulated in the city.
Sims not being simulated in SimCity...
Yeah, think about that.
The result of all this is that you end up focusing on density and efficient design,
which means largely ignoring some of the fun additions, like curved roads,
since they aren't exactly an ideal use of the small space in most situations.
Though it does prod you into using the included city specializations,
another new addition to the series.
With these, you have special buildings that can boost multiple aspects of your city.
Things like coal and ore mining,
drilling for oil, placing tourist traps and landmarks,
manufacturing and trading scarce goods like processors and TVs,
or creating row upon row of casinos.
Some of these, like mining and drilling,
rely on limited underground resources,
and others simply require that you have the initial population and funds to support them.
You also have great works to deal with now,
which are something multiple cities in a region can put funds and resources toward
for the betterment of the entire area.
And while I admit relying on big, regional projects
and playing a mining outpost is enjoyable,
in that quaint, Small Town, West Virginia kind of way,
I'd rather have a city that encompasses a bunch of strengths
and is actually capable of working how a proper city should.
"A world of endless possibilities?"
Yeah, not so much.
Even if I become attached to my little plot of land
and love seeing how it gets more complex over time,
it's just not something that holds my attention
the same way as previous SimCity games.
It's like I can never really get into the game to the degree I want to,
because I either run out of space or run into some kind of crazy roadblock
involving the game going wrong.
There are a ton of little things that just drive me crazy,
from the aforementioned pathfinding agent issues
to the weird glitches with building and road placement
and even time stopping altogether with no way to turn it back on,
to not being able to manually rotate things like parks,
to the lack of decorative options
to fill in all the blank space behind certain lots,
to all the blank space in between cities and the regions,
to the inconsistencies with available workers versus total population,
to the lack of ordinances, subways and modding capabilities,
to the fact that you can't save a game, try something out,
and reload it if it doesn't work
because the saves are all automatically linked to the cloud.
The auto cloud-saving in particular all but eliminates the desire
to play with the disasters or experiment too heavily
outside of Sandbox Mode.
And then you can't always rely on the cloud to even save your game,
and I've even seen cities get rolled back to a previous state or disappear entirely
due to something going wrong in the process.
Then you've got all the other issues relating to the always-on DRM of the game,
which has caused no small amount of headaches for me thus far.
It feels like a promising cover band that has its own strengths,
but somehow just doesn't hold the same allure as the original,
and then starts throwing up on stage
and playing out of tune halfway through the set,
then wanders into the crowd and starts punching people in the neck.
So, is SimCity worth buying or not?
Well, as a SimCity fan, it pains me to say it,
but at $60 for just the regular version of the game,
no way, not right now.
The issues here COULD be fixed, at least in theory,
but I can't say I have much hope for many of them.
I'd love to be surprised. I mean, I WANT to recommend this game
because it's SimCity. I love SimCity and Maxis games,
and it IS incredibly fun when it's not being a huge pain.
The game has its charm, for a while at least,
and it's quite obvious that some serious talent is on the team at Maxis.
I mean, just look at all the little touches like
color filters and the music that beats along with the simulation.
And I really like how graffiti shows up in higher crime areas
and the quirky names for each building and things like that.
There's a lot to like here and in many ways
it feels like a step towards the SimCity that I want.
But the problem now is that I always end up feeling a bit disappointed
in either the simulation or the server side of things when I play it.
And for a full-priced game, that's just not something I can let slide.
Sorry but as it is now,
SimCity sucks.
[orchestral music plays to the end]