Overall 9.2 Graphics 7.5 Sound 6.8 Addictive 8.5 Story 4 Depth 7.8 Difficulty 7.3
9.2
You build a city, and they will come - or leave, if you call in Bowser to destroy the town! endings
Simcity is a lot of fun. Its an early sandbox game. The game lets you pick a map, and you build however you want. The game has a mentor named Dr. Wright, who will try to guide you towards building the biggest, happiest city you can make. And while thats fine and good, you don't have to listen to him. You can make a bad city, full of crime and pollution. A city with NO fire departments, or a city that has no highways, only railroads. ?Its open to you from the beginning, you can build however you want, whenever you want, as long as you have the capital to buy it.
However, there is not much in haphazard building. You will need a power plant, first. and consider that. Then you must start plotting your land. This game wants grids, not just power grids, it also wants from the 3 types of districts, Industrial (jobs), Commercial (jobs and relaxation), and Residential (population). Building these according to needs is paramount to city growth, as is supply power to each, and roads to run to them - else they move out quickly with no connection to the rest of the town.?
If you enjoyed the game Populous, this is somewhat like that. Just be warned this game is about admiring your buildings, looking for trouble spots, and reading a lot of graphs. You are a mayor, but beyond city control and allocations of funds and taxes, your involvement stops there. You direct what people do, but not how fast the groups do their jobs. You are not going with the fire department to put out a fire, but you can build more fire departments nearby to hasten them.
Graphics: 7
The game takes place with a bird-eye view over your city. Because of the distance, there is no way to zoom in for detail. But you get some touches: the waves lap at the shores, you can see ant-like traffic jams, your planes patrolling the skies, the crowd at a football stadium, etc. You can watch the areas grow, each zone changes form based on the success of the city.l The highlight being the bright graphics of some of the awards you get from your mentor, and the merging of two successful buildings into one big one. But the graphics are not this games strong point.?
Sound: 6
The music is different depending on the level of your town (village to town, town to city, etc). All of it is fairly nice, but there is no going back to
select previous ones. The industrial grind of metropolis is not as peaceful as the village music, but it fits the size of your towns. Sound effects are sparse, the click of menus, a siren when something bad happens. A dull thud of a building exploding from an earthquake, or other natural disaster. You can make Bowser stop by your town if you're feeling bad, and he roars occasionally.
Addictiveness: 9
Simcity is very fun. From having free reign to build, and the difficulties of juggling managing a bustling city, there is a lot to do here. As you build things and perform well, Dr. Wright the helper will offer you rewards. Its great fun in the main game, but perhaps you prefer some structure. ?There are also scenario games, such as rebuilding after a disaster, which give you cities already, and let you deal with their problems.
Story: 4
If it was just up to you taking scenarios, or freeplay growing your town, I'd give this game a 2. But with the introduction of Dr. Wright, you at least get a small feel for having planning strategies, and the many forms and graphs help everything seem more official. Its not much of a story, but it also doesn't get in the way of what you want to do - and thats a good advantage. But also, you don't quite feel like a mayor, and more like a dictator. You never leave office, you don't have any committee meetings, its streamlined for ease of playing --but no one says no to you - and that feels a little weird.
Depth: 8
The people of your city are often complainers. There is always something they're mad about, and popularity is a big responsibility in this game. Learning how to grow your town efficiently, balancing their needs with the requirements of expanding takes some patience and planning. Its not just responsibility, you also get to have a lot of fun. Your gifts add variety to the landscape, and there is many things to get.
Difficulty: 6
The game just has a curve to master it, and managing your money. Most of the times the natural disasters are yours to choose to implement, and do not affect the main game. I would have liked to see situations like you facing getting voted out of office, or perhaps using your police department to prepare for say a crime spree.?
SimCity is great fun to build, fairly easy to understand, and takes awhile to master. With your ability to name the region, enjoy living in ZOMBIETOWN, or perhaps you'll call it EVERYBODY RUN!! or even NEOTOKYO. ?The Biggest hangup is at the beginning, where you are drawing maps to
select, and the load time is horrible (like 10 seconds a map, and there are over 900 to look at). I'll just save you the trouble and tell you 061 is a great map. Try that.
Graphics 7 Sound 6 Addictive 9 Story 4 Depth 8 Difficulty 7
Review Rating: 5/5
Submitted: 09-01-14
Updated: 09-09-14
Review Replies: 0
7.6
Sim City - Where city building got its start. geeogree
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.
Graphics 8 Sound 7 Addictive 8 Depth 6 Difficulty 9
Review Rating: 4/5
Submitted: 04-29-16
Review Replies: 1