SimCity 4 (PC)
Will you be a Bloomberg or a Marion Barry?
By Susie Vee

PLATFORM: PC

PUBLISHER: EA

DEVELOPER: Maxis

GENRE: Simulation

ESRB: Teen

SCORE:

The entire Sim empire, from The Sims and its various expansion packs to lesser-known efforts like SimAnt, all trace their common lineage back to one game – SimCity. More than a decade ago, gamers fired up their primitive PCs to play mayor and take a small burg and turn it into a bustling metropolis.

Will Wright’s simple but deeply complex urban simulator let you plan city neighborhoods, supply power, water and essential city services and maintain the delicate balance that keeps real-life cities from imploding. Both educational and entertaining, SimCity and its sequels were found in classrooms and home for years.

The latest edition, SimCity 4, takes all the classic SimCity ideas and gives them a solid graphical polish while adding plenty of new elements for today’s more demanding gamers.

One great new addition is the highly interactive God Mode, where you can terraform the landscape to your heart’s content before even starting a city. It’s very amusing and provides some nice real-time 3D warping graphics, but ultimately, you’ll do just as well picking one of the pre-existing parcels of land.

Setting up simple residential, industrial and commercial zones, your city can begin to take shape fairly quickly. And, if you’re not careful, it can just as easily spiral out of control. Like some Robert Moses project gone haywire, a few wrong turns can leave you with uncontrollable traffic, areas with no power or a just plain undeveloped downtown.

Knowing what to do in these circumstances can be a bit tricky. The game manual covers some useful tactics, but is annoyingly sparse on basic gameplay mechanics. For that, you’ll have to slog through the non-too-thorough in-game tutorial. That will give you the very basics, but from there on in it’s largely trial-and-error.

In the actual game, a series of advisors and news alerts will key you into problems, but their advice can be vague at times. Often you’ll build something and have no idea why your simulated population isn’t making full use of the things you give them.

It’s also easy to accidentally put down buildings the wrong way, so that your Sims can’t access them. Try building a hospital that no one can drive to and you’ll see what we mean.

Another tip for newbies – start off slowly. Build too much too soon, and your expenses will quickly outstrip your tax revenues. And once you’re in a hole like that, you might as well pack up and move to the next town over.

Of course, SimCity 4 has all the great disasters that SimCity is famous for. This time, we get volcanoes, earthquakes, meteors and even a giant robot from, presumably, outer space.

If you’re so inclined, you can even get more personalized feedback than found in the news ticker by importing Sims from your existing Sims game.

Despite the game’s impressive 3D graphics, SimCity 4 is still basically a 2D isometric affair. Even without worrying about sweeping cameras and high-poly models, the game is sluggish, even on high-powered systems. Chances are you’ll find scrolling around your city to be a bit of a pain, as you wait for the camera to catch up, or the 3D models to fully render. It’s too bad, there’s no reason a high-profile release like this couldn’t have been performance-tweaked a little more.

If you’re a SimCity fan, you’ll obviously want to play the new version. If you’re new to the genre, and you’re looking for something different than the usual shooting or platform-jumping fare, then you’re encouraged to check this game out.