City Life 2008 Edition
Review
City Life just got a bit more exciting!
by Marko Susimetsä
reviewed on PC
The social schism (cont.)
Fortunately, the game provides you with lots of useful information that will help you to minimise the social problems. First, you will see the areas on the map clearly marked with the colour of the social group that inhabits the area – blue streets go for the Blue Collars, white for Elite, red for the Fringe and orange for the Radical Chic etc. Second, the first media reports can actually be helpful in pointing our the regions where trouble is imminent – it is worth your while to check the situation out as quickly as possible. Third, and the most important, the game manual actually tells you a lot about how to plan your city.
And, before I could go on and write how ridiculously stereotypical the various cultural groups are, I noticed that the developers freely admit this and beg us to remember that this is a game that we are playing here, not the real thing.
Running your city
While it is simple at the beginning of the game to make your way and analyse different situations as you go, you will need some help when the city grows larger and larger and you begin to forget where you put your police stations and biggest malls. For this purpose City Life 2008 provides a plethora of visual cues on the map: police helicopters make them easy to notice and the malls and other buildings, although numerous in appearance, are modelled so well after the real things (at least if you know what architecture and billboards tend to look like in the US of A) that they are easily recognised.
When the residents realise – after moving in to their new villas – that there aren't any shops or entertainment in the near vicinity, and even the doctor is a long drive away, the affected buildings will be marked with various symbols to make you notice what the people require. In addition to this, you can easily access your financial data to see which services are costing you the most to maintain, which businesses are the most profitable and even to raise a loan if you find yourself short of cash. Other information screens include social indicators of your residents' expectations in different areas, service quality indicators, indicators showing the influx of people (or the loss, of course) and tourism. All these, and the media reports, offer you so much information on your metropolis that it is a very good thing that the game starts small and lets you grow into your responsibilities slowly and steadily.
Graphics and sounds
There appears to be little advancement in the graphics when compared to the original game – although the buildings are more numerous, they look more or less the same and you still get the same clone people walking on the streets wearing different colours of clothing depending on their social class. All in all, the graphics are very serviceable and suit the game's style perfectly. The only fault that I can find is that they are also very American. You will not be able to recreate Paris or any other European or Asian city in this game, unless you turn a blind eye to the Blue Collar people wearing their stereotypically American clothing and baseball caps and Stetsons. Naturally, all the building models will also take you to the American continent and you will not see examples of the architecture of other continents or cultures, unless you build specific landmark buildings that come from that culture (but just imagining a Taj Mahal or Parthenon overrun with people wearing Stetsons makes me gag).
The sounds are also very good and serve their functions well. The background music is perfect for a modern city simulator, but pretty repetitive, so you may want to turn it off sooner or later and listen to something else while you play. It never gets nearly as annoying as the modern era music in Civilization IV, though, so your sanity is not in danger.
To govern or not to govern?
Overall, I think that City Life 2008 is perfect for anyone who enjoys tinkering with these sorts of games, or who is on the lookout for a good casual game to pick up now and again to continue developing their pet city. City Life 2008 Edition makes city management fun, but offers a lot of opportunities for tinkering for those who have to get everything just perfect.
City Life 2008 will most likely not drive you to extreme emotions, as most bad situations can be recovered from pretty easily and all setbacks are, in the end, relatively temporary and don't affect your success in the long run. Therefore, I recommend this game to all those gamers who suffer from high blood pressure or other disagreeable symptoms when they try to play FPSs or other more strenuous games.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
