SimCity Beta Review from a lifelong SimCity player

[landstander248 8]

I have a lot of nice things to say about this demo, and some bad, but first, and most importantly... yes, these cities are tiny.

My Experience

I played the one-hour demo 3 times through, and each playthrough was more successful than the last. My third game, I was able to fill most of the map with medium density buildings, reaching a population of 30,000, an income of $10k/hour and a bank account with half a million simoleons. I had some nice mid-rise commercial buildings, mostly banks, a few large shopping centers and dozens of large apartment complexes. The development of my industrial buildings was less obvious - they all kind of looked the same.

Graphics

I'm playing on a modern system (Core i5, 8gb RAM) but with an outdated graphics card (Radeon 4870). I was given a warning that my system was below specs and when the game launched the default graphics were at the lowest settings. On these settings, the game looked laughably bad.

Slowly, I ramped up the graphics options. I was shocked to discover I could play on a mix of high and medium settings with minimal lag! That 4870 really is an amazing card (as modern bench-marking continues to show). Even at a nice medium-high mix, the graphics were unimpressive. Then, I turned the tilt-shift to high and the game really came alive. I highly recommend using this option, especially if you're running a lower end graphics card. It takes away a lot of the "cartoony" look, makes up for lack of AA, and is overall very impressive.

I didn't try to up the AA, which would presumably improve the visual experience significantly. The textures seemed to be lacking, but I'll withhold judgement until I get a new graphics card.

Town Building

Building works smoothly overall, though zoning is somewhat restricted and I had a hard time creating the look I wanted, particularly with low density residential. It's also difficult to gauge the proper city block size, though I'm sure that gets easier with experience. An option to drag and place zones over multiple blocks is noticeably absent.

Road placement is simple enough, as are road upgrades, though upgrading from road to avenue is not a built-in feature and requires some seriously messy bulldozing.

You also can't place buildings without having a road first, making it difficult to fit certain buildings in specific places - something you will be very concerned with as you try to build on the edge of these tiny maps.

I was hesitant at first about the ploppable components, but overall I like them. You do need to keep extra space available around buildings like schools and police stations for these ploppable pieces, and it will take some experience to learn how much space to save for different buildings. From what I gauge, you'll never need to build two of the same service in one city, instead you'll just upgrade your single fire station or medical clinic, though there are advanced versions of most buildings that presumably replace the smaller versions.

Building bus stops for transit and school buses was simple and fun. Building parks is a mixed bag, with many parks coming in unusual shapes and sizes (though the variety is very nice).

Building near the water was frustrating and poorly implemented.

There's a sub-menu for specialization buildings, though only the casino is available in the demo. The offerings are plentiful and interesting, and you can tell right away that this menu will someday be packed with DLC and, hopefully, mods. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine fitting many of these buildings in one town.

Simulation

The first problem I noticed was traffic. Cars don't seem to consider traffic congestion when they choose their route - they appear to take the shortest route in terms of distance. In my first city, I had several roads connecting to an avenue which led to the industrial part of town. Everyone chose to take the same road to the avenue, even though it was completely clogged with traffic, instead of driving an extra block to take a completely empty road to the very same avenue. This could be a serious concern.

In subsequent cities, I made sure that different residential areas had separate routes to jobs, which alleviated the worst of my traffic problems but also limited my design options.

Other than traffic, everything seemed to run smoothly. The feedback of RDI and the development of density seems to function as one would expect, although I'm not a fan of requiring specific roads to allow for specific density. Many real world cities have old, small roads running through downtown cores - but then again, this is not a game meant for building realistic cities with downtown cores. I also worry that a truly dense city would require a huge number of avenues, which themselves take up a considerable amount of space on these little maps.

Region Play

There isn't much region play in the demo, but it looks like an interesting and worthwhile part of the game. It will certainly help to create specific types of towns on the small maps, since various services, jobs, etc can be placed in some cities while you focus on residential and commercial in other cities. The Great Works are also a fine idea, especially considering the small map size, though I'm not sure how many great works you'll have space for in different regions.

User Interface

They really nailed it on the UI. When you click on a different building category, you automatically switch to a real-time info view related to that category. As a result, you're never placing a police station, for example, without simultaneously seeing the safety activity of your town. Same with utilities, parks and so on. The icons for the different building categories also serve as warning indicators, turning orange and then red when that particular service needs attention.

There's plenty of depth with additional info-views, but some information seems to be lacking. How many people live in this apartment complex? I'm not sure we get to know.

Final Word - City Size

SimCity has a lot going for it. It's a well optimized and well designed game that's easy to play and enjoyable to look at. But it's not a city simulator in the traditional sense, instead it's a city "game", where you find yourself more concerned with following the game rules than designing and running your own creation.

Part of the problem is that most of the creations we want to build are based on our real-world experience of living in and visiting towns and cities. The small city size will immediately crush your dreams of sprawling suburbs or massive downtowns, and suddenly you realize how few city concepts you have room to try and create at all. Within these limits, I can't create a reasonable model of the large city I live in now or even the small town suburb where I grew up. In the end, I was left with the distinct feeling that I was playing a video game, not building a city, very unlike the sensation I have when playing SimCity 4 or CitiesXL.

I think it's obvious that "user experience" is the justification for the small city sizes. Larger cities would require more powerful systems to run properly, and would diminish the game experience of the masses of players who don't have gaming PCs. I understand the reasoning, but I can't support it. Most of the best simulation games - like previous SimCity titles and the Civilization series - struggle mightily in the late-game on large maps, even on systems built many years after the game's release. That's just part of how simulation games work. Some of us will tolerate laggy gameplay and low settings in order to play the biggest maps, others will happily play small maps until they have a new system 2 or 3 years down the road. In this SimCity, we don't have a choice.

I will still buy this game and play it for many hours, but unless a version is someday created that allows for large cities, I can't consider this the rightful heir to the city building genre. If I can't recreate my beloved San Francisco, I'm just not satisfied.

P.S.

If you want to create large, sprawling simulations that resemble real-to-life population centers, I suggest you try latest in the CitiesXL series if you haven't already. I enjoy it much more than a heavily-modded SimCty 4, but both games arguably still share the crown of large scale city simulators.

[Servan 5]

Now this is a very nicely detailed review, thanks!

[SirChick 184]

BETA won't connect for me, servers are down Can't play! This is why i hate online only!

Wish i could try it to see how much i agree or disagree with your review

[Dewm 177]

Good review, and answered the few questions I had left. Thanks for saving me $60.00

[Howzer00 2]

BETA won't connect for me, servers are down Can't play! This is why i hate online only!

Wish i could try it to see how much i agree or disagree with your review

I'm having the same issue. I hate online only.

[Cob92 360]

I don't understand why EA ALWAYS underestimates server needs for its games. This happens with Battlefield and every other EA title; they never put up the necessary infrastructure until weeks after the final release of the game. I don't mind always online as long as the servers work, but apparently, making a game as reliable as Facebook or Google is out of the question for the EA suits.

[magicrobbie 77]

Simulation

The first problem I noticed was traffic. Cars don't seem to consider traffic congestion when they choose their route - they appear to take the shortest route in terms of distance. In my first city, I had several roads connecting to an avenue which led to the industrial part of town. Everyone chose to take the same road to the avenue, even though it was completely clogged with traffic, instead of driving an extra block to take a completely empty road to the very same avenue. This could be a serious concern.

That's a great observation and it hasn't really been discussed in this Forum so far. I can confirm that traffic flow seems a bit off. I built a city with one big avenue cutting it in 2 halves and tons of medium density streets in a pretty efficient grid. The Sims all rushed to take the avenue. As a consequence, there were huge traffic jams on the avenue, even though all the other roads were empty. I was also not able to figure out how the traffic simulation actually works - I had traffic jams in remote dead ends even though there was no obvious reason for cars to take that route. And regarding busses - I think it is great that bus stops no longer eat up whole city tiles, however it is a pity one cannot determine bus routes. Sims will be happy if you just drop a ton of bus stops randomly on the map. In reality however, and I believe Glassbox could/should pick this up, chaotically placed bus stops should lead to very inefficient routes. You know, I remember that only Simtropolis mods actually fixed the traffic system in Sim City 4 - it is good to have great and very capable fan base. I guess those types of mods are no longer possible.