Game Review: SimCity – It’s good to be the dueling elected public servant

 

Being the mayor is hard. You have to be a man/woman of many hats; leader, negotiator, peacemaker, financial genius, visionary, impartial voice of the law, people person, salesman, and sometimes a symbol. They often have a small chunk of the world on their shoulders everyday they’re in the position and even though we expect them to be the infallible fixtures of the system – they’re human, like us all. You couldn’t pay me enough to be the mayor of anything; I wouldn’t want to screw anything up. That what’s great about SimCity, you can try your hand at running a city without the backlash of destroying a community due to negligence or corruption.

 

SimCity doesn’t have a story, it has an objective: you’re a mayor, find an unspoiled (or if you’re gutsy abandoned) land, start building and running it. That’s pretty much it, but as you’ll find early on in this is a game is that the story is the only simple thing about the game. Now usually I talk about the good things about a game before the bad, but this time I’m going to get the negatives out the way because they’re few and far between in SimCity. First off queue crowding still persist, yes like I reported yesterday SimCity servers are having trouble handling the high volume of players trying to play – which is annoying. They’re still working the problem but its been a week… The other sour note is that the game has a slightly steep learning curve; seriously I’ve ruined five cities before I got the hang of the game and even still can be tough. But I suppose is the point, it wouldn’t be quite the epic game if it was too easy. That’s right I said epic, because SimCity is the best, most complex puzzle game I’ve ever played.

 

This is Sim-Monster (not his/her official name), it likes garbage and destroying buildings. Lucky your city has both.

 

It may not seem like a puzzle game, but it is. The puzzle is to create a successful city; and the pieces are residential, commercial, industrial buildings, utilities, natural resources, money, tourism, gambling, technology, education, and even the land you wish to build on. It’s up to the player to use these tools properly in order to solve the puzzle. Using anyone of these incorrectly can spell doom for your city. Each forward move you’ll make will have a negative effect as well, no matter how slight. Builds some homes for the people but they’ll need a place to work, build factories for jobs but it creates pollution, too much pollution could poison the city’s drinking water, the people don’t like poisoned water so they’ll leave – because it all started with build houses. It almost never ending – I you’ll love every minute of it. Watch as minutes turn to hours, then to days and now to a week trying to create a model of perfection only to be ruin by hubris or a giant rampaging garbage eating mutation (yes that happens in the game – one of seven random disasters in fact).

 

 

 Ranking

 

SimCity is a Zen Garden in game form: you don’t have fight a villain, kill aliens, uncover a conspiracy, lead and army, and unlock the mysteries of the universe – just plop building and drawing roads. As difficult and time consuming this game can be, there is a certain satisfaction of watching your city change and grow right before your eyes. Your SimCity is as colorful or gritty as you make, your sim people go about there daily lives not knowing what behind every corner – do you care about them and there well being or rain terror upon them? Will you be an island in the region or will you work together with other players and create a great things (or wroght chaos). This questions and experiences can only be answered and enjoyed in this title. Give it a week for the servers to become stable then pick up this title, it will change your definition of gaming for the better.

 

 

 

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