Sim City was made for the SNES and released in the early 90's and is the first really good city building game every made. There had been plenty of civilization building type games made but nothing that went down to the city level like Sim City did. Sim City was one of the first games for the SNES that I owned and I put quite a few hours into it. Like, hundreds of hours. Thankfully I learned about the cheat to give yourself a ton of money and that made the game SO much easier. Without it the game is quite difficult to manage as a small kid. Still, even without the code the game is great and lots of fun to play.

Graphics 8/10 – what can you see about a game made in 1989 and ported to the SNES that has these kinds of graphics? Are they the absolute best the SNES could do? No, but for the time they were great. I personally loved the building variety that showed up with each kind of building. It wasn’t anything like the variety the games have today but for the time it was great. Most buildings had 3 or 4 different types of building it could become and each version had 4 or 5 levels it could reach. The residential and commercial even had a special way to combine 2 buildings into 1 super huge building. These things were great to see.

The other smaller details were nice to see. Very basic traffic could be seen as well as having a moving train. The train location didn’t matter because people still got where they needed to go but it was cool to see it move around the map. I also liked some of the specialty building designs that you could earn depending on what you did. The mayor’s house growing as you progressed or the various other rewards like the Zoo or the Bank. These little extras did a good job of breaking up the monotony that the other 3 buildings types could eventually have. Not that I didn’t like the other builds but when you’ve got a screen full of residential and commercial buildings there is only so much variety there. Having these other buildings did help.

Sound 7/10 – I really loved the music for this game. The individual themes that each city size got was great. Metropolis was my personal favorite and the one I spent the most time with because once you hit 100,000 the next song started at 500,000 and that took a LOT of time and effort to reach. If you played without the cheat code then you would spend more time on the lower level songs but that still doesn’t prevent the songs from getting repetitive. Thankfully they aren’t TOO annoying of songs.

They start out pretty slow and laid back with the Village theme. It feels very much like what life would be like with only a hundred people living in the same area. Once you break 2,000 people then you move up to the Town song which is a bit more upbeat than the Village theme but still has the small town feel to it. Then you get to City at 10,000 people which has a more modern sound to it than the previous 2 songs. It also has a more upbeat feel to it. At 50,000 people is Capital which feels VERY modern as a song goes (as modern as a song can feel in 1989). Breaking 100,000 brings on the Metropolis theme which like I said before is my favorite of them all. I’ve probably listened to this song longer than just about any other single song out there. Still, the song progression for each of these songs becomes more modern and more “big city” feel to it. The Megalopolis song diverts from the feel of the other songs though. It has a more celebratory feel to it since this is basically the victory song for the game.

Overall I like the sound for this game but spending hours and hours listening to the same 4 or 5 tracks can become a bit annoying at times. If I were to play this game again I would likely listen to the songs as I progressed through to Metropolis and then after a while turn the sound off and switch to my own music as I continued to play.

Addictiveness 8/10 – Like I’ve said a few times now this gave is extremely addictive to play. I’m not sure exactly what it is about the game but I kept being drawn back in. Trying to earn more money to expand my city, while at the same time trying to keep everyone happy and prevent any problems that may arise was really interesting and enjoyable.

Having the scenarios to play through added a bit more fun to the game beyond just building your own town. You had to understand the nature of a problem and solve it in a short amount of time (5 years usually) which put your skills to the test. I believe you could use the cheat code in this mode which made a lot of the scenarios pretty easy but if you did not cheat then they were all a pretty good challenge. Not impossible in any way but fun for sure.

Story n/a – you are the mayor of a city and it is your job to build it. That’s it!

Depth 6/10 – this game is pretty limited in scope. I can’t fault it too much as it is the first game in the series of games to come after but to start out it is pretty basic. You have less than 20 options of things to build in total (not counting every individual reward item). Let’s see if I can remember them all. Roads, railroads, power lines, parks, residential, commercial, industrial, police departments, fire departments, stadium, coal power, nuclear power, seaport, airport and then the reward button I think. Okay, I looked at a screenshot for that . Considering this is a city building game that just feels like it isn’t enough variety. The rewards help, as does the RCI building variety but even so future games do so much more and this game could have done more if it wanted to.

The other issue I have is that in the end you are doing the same thing over and over. Doesn’t matter if you spend 100 hours on a city the next one is going to be basically the same. City building over and over and over again. The scenarios do provide a bit of variety but once those are done it is back to city building again.

Difficulty 9/10 – the only way to “win” this game is to get to 500,000 people. This is only achievable by building in a very specific way. Without knowing this method it is very hard to get to 500,000 people. Most maps it is not possible to do it without using a certain method and on some maps it is even harder to do without using an even more unique method than the one most people use to do it.

If you are just playing the game for fun then it is not very difficult. The mechanics of the game are straightforward and easy to understand even for a kid. There are only a handful of things to manage in order to keep the people happy. If you could do those things while also making money then you could slowly build up your city.

One thing I would do was turn off disasters and then leave my city to run overnight while earning money every day. As long as everything stayed stable I would come back the next morning to having 100,000’s of dollars to my name that I could then use to really expand my city quickly. That was the only easy way around not having much money but refusing to use the cheat code.

Overall 7.6/10 – a solid rating for a solid game. It was far from being a perfect game but it was a well made city building game that kept you coming back for more. The graphics were great for the early 90’s and the sound was good (though very repetitive). The game itself was oddly fun to play. It might have been the simple nature of the game that made it easy and fun to get into. And while “beating” the game was tough the game itself was easy enough that anyone could play and have a lot of fun.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes city building games or management style games.

Great review geeogree. I enjoyed reading it.

I honestly really enjoyed playing this game when it released on SNES. I thought it was the first really good transition of a DOS game to a console. It was fun and really had a lot of different features, considering the platform it's on. A great variety of maps to choose from and really takes a lot to really master all aspects (Without using the Money code)