SimCity 5
Review
Great game, if it works...
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Scope
Unfortunately ‘vast’ is a bit of an overstatement. Unlike previous iterations of SimCity, you are not going to fit millions of sims into the same city. Maps are decidedly tiny and will fill quicker than you would like. If you love tinkering with the inner workings of your city, you will no doubt love figuring out how to cram the most people into your city but I expect most mayors will simply claim another and make a fresh start soon after space runs out.
When you do, you will find out that navigating the regional map is a chore. You can’t scroll the region map like you would on the city map. Instead you have to click on thin, often far away squares that make the game change focus towards the indicated buildable area. Frustratingly, the camera viewpoint is so ill chosen that it is almost impossible to see what rail and highway connections lie between the various cities. With every other interface aspect of the game – save the aforementioned road grid – being polished to a shine, having to struggle with the regional map is quite disappointing.
And while laying roads is easy, the grid guiding lines can be more than a little wonky and don’t necessarily indicate the optimal space for your buildings. I often found that two roads simply refused to connect gracefully because they were off by a few pixels. Odd when you consider than both were laid using the gridlines.
My last gripe is with SimCity’s disasters. Being the mayor of a simulated city, I can handle a meteor storm or earthquake. What I cannot handle are zombies, UFO’s and Godzilla’s running through my city but unless you go sandbox – meaning your work does not go onto the leaderboards – there is no way to shut them off. Unless someone tells me these things happen in real life, they have no place in a simulation, no matter how playful it is meant to be.
Online? Offline
Were it not for the fact that SimCity’s servers have been so broken, the above criticisms would have been all there was to complain about. Unfortunately, the decision to design SimCity to only work with an online connection is adding a truckload of other things.
EA have defended the ‘always online’ requirement by saying that it offered them a chance to do things with the game they would not otherwise be able to do. I don’t necessarily disagree with that idea and I absolutely love where the game innovates using its online connection. Yet a week after release many of the features that the online play would bring are still unavailable and server availability remains dodgy. Finding a new server to play on is a viable solution, but SimCity’s cloud service is not smart enough to transfer your game along to the new server. You start anew and even have to open (and close) the tutorial town every time that you switch.
Prior to writing this article I toyed with the idea of handing in a one sentence review saying “My score for this utterly broken game is 1 out of 10”. Yet having spent some time with SimCity before its release, I knew there was a great game on the other side of the server issues. One sentence would not have done justice to the hard work of Maxis’ creative team and SimCity deserves a 9 out of 10 if it works as it was intended to. It still doesn’t.
We can only hope SimCity’s shameful release will be a wakeup call for EA. Their track record indicates that it won’t but I doubt we will graciously give them a week to fix their next game before scoring it.
7.5
fun score
Pros
Wonderfully deep simulation that you can play with friends.
Cons
Servers are still not functioning, much of the online functionality is switched off.
