SimCity 2013 Beta Reviews - Any new reviews should be posted here!

[Vahr 341]

In order to organize things and make it easier to discuss the beta, any new beta reviews should be posted here. Some older reviews will be merged into this thread manually as time allows.

To keep things clean, please use the following format.

Any review or reply that does not follow this format WILL be removed. Any post found violating the forum rules will be removed as well, as normal. This means no swearing, strong language, insults, or anything else you wouldn't say to your mother. "Dis suks EA die" could be much more eloquently written as "I really don't like this at all, EA could have made a better choice." Any review on either side (or even in the middle) is welcome, so long as its civil!

In terms of removed posts: If I have time I might simply edit your post to fit, but if I don't have the time or cannot figure out which your reply falls under or is a response to, it will be hidden. PM me to restore your post so you can edit it accordingly if this happens.

For writing a review:

<username here>'s Review

*review here*

For discussing a review:

RE - <reviewer's username>

*response here*

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(Okay, nobody ever told me ST automatically merged consecutive posts... but yeah, first batch)

Solopop's Review

[Copied from original thread - BL]

City Tile/Region

Okay so these two areas highlight my greatest disappointment in the switch from SC4 to SimCity. My favorite part of SC4 was the fact that the regions were enormous and so were the city tiles, it meant I was able to spend hours on end just working on even the smallest of tiles so you can understand my disappointment to discover in the new game I was able to fill my city up in the space of half an hour. The tile size is just horrific I understand that the developers maybe wanted it so that the entire region became 'one city' but that's not what we the player wants - we want a range of sizes for our tiles, we want the freedom to have a city be as large or a small as we want - not as small as a group of developers who have no grasp on what the general population that plays SimCity wants. Next is obviously the region is also just far too small, and those caps between the tiles are just so stupid and annoying! Why not let all that space between tiles become smaller tiles, so it can look like a continuous metropolitan area? And then, you've taken away the freedom in letting the user decide what they want their region to look like - we want to be able to create our own mountains and have our own lakes not to be told we have to use the limited designs the developers have made - We want terraforming

Buildings

Seeing all those beautiful images thought, yeah we should get buildings similar to the quality of those in SC4 - boy was I wrong. The buildings just looked soooo fake, the lacked diversity(save maybe one has a different color) and there weren't enough addons for ploppable buildings to satisfy us so we can make all of our cities different.

Zoning

I like zoning in the way it followed the road, my problem is though I wish there was a function that would let us drag the zone and then drag roads with it so we don't have those unrealistic gaps between homes. And I'd like to have the option to choose whether I want high/medium/low density I don't want the game to tell me what I'm allowed, because that's just not realistic.

I have a few other complaints and so on, I still enjoyed the game it's just such a let down from the hype. I may but it, I may not either way SC4 is clearly superior.

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RE - Solopop

Concerning the zone, I have noticed that the road guide allows you to know where to place the next road avoiding gaps.

Depending on the road you choose the guide will change to fit the good density of population!

RE - Solopop

Yeah I follow those, but the lines don't snap onto the dots which often causes it to end in a mess.

Also, I'd like to add - A problem with the casino was even though I was plopping stuff for it to be one casino it felt like 5 different places - not 1 casino.

RE - Solopop

If you look through the threads on this board you'll see that a good portion of the community here agrees with everything you've said. Unfortunately even though these problems were brought up a year ago when the game was announced Maxis has tried to avoid addressing them. The most we've gotten is a tweet from Ocean Quigley stating that these problems will be addressed somewhere down the road after the game is released, which isn't reassuring. Instead of delaying the game after the huge uproar and fixing it, they've decided to stay on schedule and release an unpolished game. The game was from the outset meant to be a multiplayer/casual game which is why there were no things such as large cities, continuous cities, terraforming, etc. If they release these things as an expansion or DLC that'll be a huge slap in the face of the fans since these features were already in SimCity 4.

RE - Solopop

...

You right, but we need to understand their point of view, if they delay the game, the community will be less tender than now... More of that I don't know if you have checked the credits, they are a lot to work on this game, seriously, from an economic point of view they will lose millions if they not release the game on time!

RE - Solopop

They may lose alot more if they don't get a fix on at least something as the tile size. Id honestly drop a hundred or so if it was a well made game. I was thinking of getting two boxes so my son and i could play at the same time. But right now the wallet stays closed until there are changes made. The later it takes for them to do this the less im willing to pay.

[atlblackops 8]

atlblackop's Review

Been an avid fan of the Simcity series for years, but it looks like I may finally have to give it up. Based on the beta reviews, it appears to me that Simcity has taken a step back overall quality.

This is a City Simulator, not a TownSim. Until they fix the following, I'm not buying:

- remove population caps/limits

- Add modern transportation options (subway, monorail)

- Allow saving and reloading of Cities/Regions.

- Allow for high density construction, including skyscrapers

- Take advantage of powerful graphics cards today.

- Enough of DirectX 9C already.

This seems like simply a Simcity rehash with a new cover on it. Don't pimp yourselves.....

[Spatzimaus 77]

Re: atlblackops

This is a City Simulator, not a TownSim. Until they fix the following, I'm not buying:

- remove population caps/limits

- Add modern transportation options (subway, monorail)

- Allow for high density construction, including skyscrapers

- Take advantage of powerful graphics cards today.

Not going to comment on the others, but these?

First, there are no population caps. People got to ~70k in an HOUR, and the internal testers have apparently managed to clear the 1 million resident threshold. There are a couple "soft caps", where it's difficult to grow beyond certain amounts until you add some new modifier (parks, a new school level, a new mass transit option, etc.), but nothing that can't be worked around.

Second, SC4 didn't have subways, elevated highways, etc. in its initial release; those came in an expansion (that you paid for, naturally). As for monorails, you can already build avenues with a streetcar lane in the middle; while not elevated, it's no different than a monorail in terms of functionality.

Third, there IS high-density construction, including skyscrapers. Zone density is linked to the size of the road used, and the highest possible roads were disabled during the beta weekend (we only had access to 3 of the 4 roads and 1 of the 3 avenues, the biggest of which is the one with the streetcars). Also, even if the road is big enough, you won't see high-density construction until there's enough demand for it, which'll be tied to how much other space there is.

As for "taking advantage of powerful graphic cards", what exactly does that mean? The game looked pretty good to me, much better than SC4, and I'd much rather have a consistently smooth experience than add extra useless particle/glow effects.

But really, the biggest problem I'd have with your post was on the first line, "Based on the beta reviews". Either review it on your own experiences, or don't bother; we've got more than enough misinformation floating around as-is without adding more.

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Spatzimaus' Review

As for my own review, I'd go like this:

Gameplay: A bit less heavy on the micromanagement than previous SimCity games, for better or worse. The fact that it's using an agent-based modeling system makes it a better simulation than previous games, although this adds its own headaches (like a permanent traffic jam that led to a sizeable part of my city burning down). We didn't last long enough to see how the economy works for a developed city, but you could see many distinct paths to financial success, instead of SC4's simplicity. The downside, to me, was in that lack of micromanagement; with so little control over the actual buildings being placed, it didn't feel like I would DO as much as in previous games, but in a way that helped as it freed my attention for infrastructure management.

Scope: The smaller tiles deserve their own discussion. Yes, it felt limiting; even within just an hour, I was running into space issues for a city of ~20k people. However, I could also see the big upside of this, which was SPECIALIZATION. Playing SC4, I would make a 4x4km city, and it'd have everything in it. Every possible amenity, every monument I could find, all in one place. The only reason to make adjacent cities were for trade, or as a power plant/dump site if you wanted to remove pollution from your main city. But in this game, each city in a region will specialize, and you'll only get the full experience if you play multiple cities (either by yourself or with others). Now, I'd like to see them add a FEW larger city tiles, for those times when you really want to try the One Big City approach, but unlike SC4 I see myself spending more time playing the 2km tiles. In this beta we only had the one tile, which obviously limited this approach.

Aesthetics: Graphics and sound were both very nice. It's not as "realistic" as SC4's style, and not as cartoony as the earlier SimCity games, but works well in-between. The buildings were a bit bland, but we've seen screenshots showing how building styles alter to fit your city's specialization, which we didn't have a chance to try out for ourselves. The "island" region layout was disconcerting, with huge green spaces in-between, but I'd be okay with that if the devs filled that space with purely cosmetic small towns or suburban sprawl. And while I was never a fan of the Sims, I had no problems with the Simlish speech.

Bugginess: I ran into a few minor issues in my test games. One intersection that got screwed up to where no cars would move (solved by demolishing part of a road, then rebuilding it). Protesters who were still protesting a brief power outage a month after it had been fixed. There was too little warning of problems; you wouldn't be told your power plants weren't sufficient until they fell below the 0 line, at which point mass migrations would happen out of the city. (My city, at one point, would pinball between ~7k and ~20k inhabitants every time something ran low.) Or you'd find out your clinic wasn't enough only AFTER a bunch of people died. Now, maybe this'll be less problematic once the game is live and we can go at our own pace instead of rushing through an hour, but it was a problem with beta and so I'm mentioning it here.

Interface: Generally pretty good, but there were some annoyances. Placing large structures, like schools or a baseball diamond, just seemed harder than they should have been. The road grid was useful but too hard to bring up, and it'd key off the road type your mouse was near instead of the road type you were placing. And while it was easy to find out the likes and dislikes of your current residents, it was too hard to find out things like, why is building X still stuck in a low-density, low-wealth state when it's got everything needed to evolve into a nice mid-wealth apartment building?

Beyond that, there are just a few things I'd wish for. If not a save/load function, then at least some rudimentary moving options for if you find out that grade school you placed should have been just a little bit further to the left...

[snwboardn 18]

snwboardn's review

My only complaints are

A) the path finding system really needs work... In real life you take a different road not because it is a shorter drive but because it offers less traffic.. I too had a major breakdown in my traffic because a moving van was blocking an intersection.I made a bypass hiway as best as I could around my city, but nobody used it because it wasn't the shortest distance...

B) You need to be able to see your coverage better for schools and other amenities. My school was maxed out with students but I couldn't tell where the cutoff was.

[atlblackops 8]

RE: atlblackops

Thanks for putting forth a thoughtful response. It's clear you like the game and are willing to defend it. I've seen enough from the beta reviewers to know that I need to wait until this game is released and the final versions reviewed. Beta feedback is overwhelmingly negative. Besides, I've played all the SC titles and their reputation is clear to me.

I haven't seen a single screen cap or reported review that show high density populations and skyscrapers. Simcity site doesn't even show any. In previous versions, this was a feature. Overall, I see the game as a step back in overall quality. I'll keep my cash until after the Metacritic user reviews pile up. I could care less about the Origin 50.00 coupon offer to buy it.

[casper2433 3]

RE: Spatzimaus

Gameplay: A bit less heavy on the micromanagement than previous SimCity games, for better or worse. The fact that it's using an agent-based modeling system makes it a better simulation than previous games, although this adds its own headaches (like a permanent traffic jam that led to a sizeable part of my city burning down). We didn't last long enough to see how the economy works for a developed city, but you could see many distinct paths to financial success, instead of SC4's simplicity. The downside, to me, was in that lack of micromanagement; with so little control over the actual buildings being placed, it didn't feel like I would DO as much as in previous games, but in a way that helped as it freed my attention for infrastructure management.

I agree it was much more micromanagement than previous games, but i really thought it was great. I was able to see the flow of power to each building in my city. With that i was able to see trouble spots in my city, where maybe the agents were being used up before they got to a specific location. resulting in brownouts in spots. This allowed me to easily spot fix things before i really messed up and had city wide power failures. The economy is, from what i experienced, a delicate balance between different densities bewteen each RCI zone. While i wasnt able to test this, seeing as how i was rushing to build as much as i could within the hour, I was able toward the end of beta, to maintain a balance of demand for each zone. As such one of my last citied did break the 100K population mark. I did have an issue with some of the ploppable buildings such as schools, becoming land hogs as you expanded them. They simply took up far too much space.

Scope: The smaller tiles deserve their own discussion. Yes, it felt limiting; even within just an hour, I was running into space issues for a city of ~20k people. However, I could also see the big upside of this, which was SPECIALIZATION. Playing SC4, I would make a 4x4km city, and it'd have everything in it. Every possible amenity, every monument I could find, all in one place. The only reason to make adjacent cities were for trade, or as a power plant/dump site if you wanted to remove pollution from your main city. But in this game, each city in a region will specialize, and you'll only get the full experience if you play multiple cities (either by yourself or with others). Now, I'd like to see them add a FEW larger city tiles, for those times when you really want to try the One Big City approach, but unlike SC4 I see myself spending more time playing the 2km tiles. In this beta we only had the one tile, which obviously limited this approach.

I also agree that the tiles are a bit too small. I was also able to stuff the city full in half an hour time, however i do believe this hindered a lot of us in the beta, simply because we built everything quickly, the game simply didnt have time to figure out what the density is goint to be. In one game, i simply built one little square block that maybe took up a tenth or less of the total tile, and i did see it was easier to control the density of this small square than if i had rushed and built the entire tile up. In a half an hour on this test, this small city block reached skyscrapers and 40K population in a little over 30 minutes. I believe this is because when you create limited space for people to move into, the demand will go up quickly. Then add a park or something to increase the density of a certain income level, and immediately much larger buildings are formed and the population starts rising until the next plateau. However, when you set the entire tile with roads and zones, there is no demand since sims can pick and chose where they want to live. In the time it took to fill the entire tile with residents and increase the demand for more density, the hour was almost up and you have a massive 2kX2k town of 20k people. In essence the one hour time limit was in itself a pitfall.

I also noticed education plays quite a big part in this game. In my first few games i has a LOT of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings and almost all of them had closed due to no management available to staff the business. When i started building more schools, people became better educated, and my abandoned buildings went down to 0. Also as a side effect, businesses boomed, technology level advanced and density increased.

Aesthetics: Graphics and sound were both very nice. It's not as "realistic" as SC4's style, and not as cartoony as the earlier SimCity games, but works well in-between. The buildings were a bit bland, but we've seen screenshots showing how building styles alter to fit your city's specialization, which we didn't have a chance to try out for ourselves. The "island" region layout was disconcerting, with huge green spaces in-between, but I'd be okay with that if the devs filled that space with purely cosmetic small towns or suburban sprawl. And while I was never a fan of the Sims, I had no problems with the Simlish speech.

Honestly the graphics to me were fine. Yes they were a bit cartoony and could be a bit more realistic. The buildings were only bland in the beginning. As the density rises and large skyscrapers were build, the buildings looked much more polished. I figure it is like any other game out there where the top level stuff is the best looking. You dont start a new character in World of Warcraft, and immediately get nice shinies. You start off with crap gear and you have to work for the better looking stuff. Same with this game. I started off with nasty trailer parks, but eventually developed apartments, then skyscrapers. My skyscrapers were gorgeous and it was making me giggle every time one popped up.

As for the region play, I again think we were given only a sample of what a region could be. If you look up some internal testing vids or even some of the official teaser vids, some of the regions i have seen have twice or thrice what we had in our Beta region. I think it is going to be a blast to be able to build like 10 different cities all in the same region and each with their own specialty. If you think about it, Sim City is looking more like Sim State.

Bugginess: I ran into a few minor issues in my test games. One intersection that got screwed up to where no cars would move (solved by demolishing part of a road, then rebuilding it). Protesters who were still protesting a brief power outage a month after it had been fixed. There was too little warning of problems; you wouldn't be told your power plants weren't sufficient until they fell below the 0 line, at which point mass migrations would happen out of the city. (My city, at one point, would pinball between ~7k and ~20k inhabitants every time something ran low.) Or you'd find out your clinic wasn't enough only AFTER a bunch of people died. Now, maybe this'll be less problematic once the game is live and we can go at our own pace instead of rushing through an hour, but it was a problem with beta and so I'm mentioning it here.

I had a few bugs where the game wouldnt alow me to zone in places where there was no reason that i couldnt zone there. In one game the game wouldnt let me zone at all and i had to start a new game to fix it.

Most of your problems seems to be user error as the game gives you the tools to monitor your power and water to see if you will soon be running low. With these tools, if used properly, you can plan ahead and fix problems before they even arise. If you were getting massive blackout, it isn't the games fault that you didn't pay attention to the power gauge and see you had progressively less and less of a surplus so you could take action before you ran out completely. Same thing with the clinic. You can click on the hospital icon and see how many people died, got sick, got injured, and were treated each day. If you see big numbers in the death department, you know what to do. If you click on the clinic itself, you can see if the beds are filling and if so, expand the building before people b1tch and moan.

But in all honesty, I really can't blame you for that error, considering there is a crapload to monitor and with just an hour to do as much as you can, it is very difficult to keep an eye on these things if you are rushing to build roads and stuff. Once the game is released and we have all the time in the world and we will be able to take our time with our cities and it will be easier to manage all these things and i bet you will not run into the same problem.

Interface: Generally pretty good, but there were some annoyances. Placing large structures, like schools or a baseball diamond, just seemed harder than they should have been. The road grid was useful but too hard to bring up, and it'd key off the road type your mouse was near instead of the road type you were placing. And while it was easy to find out the likes and dislikes of your current residents, it was too hard to find out things like, why is building X still stuck in a low-density, low-wealth state when it's got everything needed to evolve into a nice mid-wealth apartment building?

Beyond that, there are just a few things I'd wish for. If not a save/load function, then at least some rudimentary moving options for if you find out that grade school you placed should have been just a little bit further to the left...

OMG i know! The schools seemsed insanely massive once you maxed out its expansion. Also some of the parks and sporting venues were equally massive and the range of effect of these didnt seem to be worth it as it didnt stretch that far for how much space a simple baseball diamond took up.

I found the road grid annoying as all hell. I would be trying to snake a road and the road would automatically snap to a grid line away from where i want it to go. I tried looking in the options for a way to turn this off, but i didnt see any. As for the problem with why you have a trailer park in a place with high income modifiers, well i kinda explained that above. The Residential and Commercial zones had 3 demand meters for each income level. If the high income demand was low, then that is why you see trailer parks there that are not evolving. Also another factor is the space you provided for said building to expand. Sometimes the buildings around it will expand into high density buildings, but they leave that trailer no room to expand. If you click on it, it might say something like, "No room to increase density." So you see, it is trying to increase, but there just isnt room. I found out that spacing residential zoning out helped this, instead of just painting the entire road green.

I have seen a number of rant posts about the "dead space" in the game, but that dead space is needed for buildings to expand and grow. This isnt 1980s Sim City where buildings are confined to the red R square and at most 2 of those squares comine for a large hotel. In this game you must provide the space for your city to grow. this is why my lottle city block did so well and grew so fast, because it had the demand and the space to go for it.

I really think there is a lot we have to discover with this game. I think we were given a teaspoon to taste from the lake that is this game. I have a suspicion that there is so much you can do with this game, that the devs know that you wont be able to spend time on terraforming or stuff like that. There will be so much to do and monitor that having massive cities much larger than the 2k x 2k tiles we have, will be impossible to monitor and manage. In some of my cities where i filled the tile, by the time i finished fixing the problem for residents on one side of the city, another 2 would pop up bitchin got stuff to be fixed. I dont know what i would do if i had just double what we had.

[prassel 9]

Prassel's Review

• origin required
  
• always-online required
  
• tiny city tiles
  
• big useless empty spaces between city tiles
  
• cant make new access points to your city
  
• cant make your own highways
  
• no terraforming at all
  
• no zone density options
  
• limited public transport options
  

As others have said, this is a huge step back from SC4 in all departments except the "agent simulation system".

They have effectively Sim-ified it into a casual game for babies.

After the beta I've lost all hope for this game.

[JoeBearPA 6]

JoeBearPA's Review

I have to agree with most of the reviews here.... and sorry to say Subways, and Monorails, and other mass transit options are crucial to get my dollar, as are larger lots... AND their download servers were very slow... by the time I managed to download it, there was almost no time left to play... I will stick with sc4. I think they should have designed to appeal to the existing base, who want a game that can be modified and that has options... otherwise this game will fail and never get to the "future updates" time that Ocean Quigley mentions. having "industrial cities" is great but I would want the option to have it all in one city if I choose... in my area, there are REAL cities that have it that way, as they are too remote to rely on neighbors.

[bergerrunner 41]

RE: JoeBearPA

Thats one of the things I was thinking about mentioning but didn't know how to put into words. EA (and I'm not going to mention Maxis because the elephant in the room is that EA is driving the sim city ship) promises these mythical updates where all our problems as sim city players will be solved. I'm not so sure. EA isn't going to produce these updates and patches and DLCs because they're nice guys. EA is a business, and they're only going to produce content if theres a market willing to consume it. One thing I'm concerned about is that the Sim City market will taper off. Myself-- I got bored of the beta after 30 minutes. I don't know what its going to be like to the new Sim City player, but you worry that the lack of features will make for a game that people wont want to play consistently and eventually forget about, and if thats the case, why would a company expand on a game very few people are interested in? Even if the DLC's make the game super amazing and everything we've hoped for, you wonder if it would be too little too late at that point

Edit: formatting got funky on me

  Edited January 30, 2013 by Blue Lightning  

[Lateralus462 12]

Lateralus462's Review

I'll start with the Positives

- Modular service buildings/structures: Absolutely loved this. The modular power, fire, police and other services is such a great functional gameplay add on, its something I've always wanted and wished for. I spent a good part of the beta time just tinkering with the look at feel of the different powerplant upgrades- just because they looked cool. (caveat: the major Firestation looks gaudy as hell, but was locked in beta)

- Day/Night cycle: The day night cycle gave the game a nice flow to it, both because of the glassbox engine and the changes in agent movement based on the time of day, but also a sense of the passage of time, that the game is moving. The late night scene of very few cars on the road and the clearly visible emergency vehicles going about their business gives the game a nice time to sit back and kind of look around.

Middle of the road:

- Road Tools: The road building tools themselves seem pretty well worked out. Some odd interactions of curved or arc'd roads with the square road tool and such, but drawing roads, upgrading and the generated "guidelines" were a nice touch once you figured out how to activate and use them.

- Graphics: Somehow this both impressed and fell short, and I suspect its both partly my video cards fault (a not quite outdated Asus EAH4870) and the game itself. The night scenes were nice, the industrial building glow and the interior detail was nice. The tilt shift was a decent novelty,

Negatives

- Service vehicles/agents: The most dim witted and aggravating path finding I've ever seen. You could have 20 garbage trucks for a small town and still have them clump on eachother and circle the same block over and over and over. School buses, garbage trucks and shuttle busses are terribly inefficient. Police cars meander oddly, but as a postivie, seem to respond to criminals and crimes quickly and effectively, but how can you not set their area of operation or set up an actual bus route (one thing Cities XL got right!).

- Road textures/intersection tiles: These were absolutely heinous. If you did any road configuration that was a little out of the ordinary, you wound up with some terrible looking and distorted tile that in no way correctly aligned with the road configuration. The "random" intersection tiles for straight roads at even small obtuse angles creating an intersection was annoying and probably should be considered a bug, of which there are many.

- Bugs: Oh god, the bugs. The service building signs altering the roads and textures, the garbage dump or school extending to the adjacent road with with a jagged piece of footprint. The glassbox power and water agents not properly serving tiles that are on the other side of the already very small map. A Coal Power Plant with 10's of MW of reserve not being able to power a small town is just silly. I watched delivery trucks take goods from factories to power plants rather than commercial businesses. The perpetual street crossing sims creating giant traffic snarls and the strange 4 way stop gridlock where cars just refuse to move where the corrective action is to destroy the road they're on. Emergency vehicles stopping at traffic lights and stop signs.

- City Size/Region: Just poorly thought out with a terrible look and feel. These awkward square plots overlayed onto the region terrain with one highway connection. No natural forming borders, no true neighbors, no even remotely realistic attempt at intercity infrastructure. "Great Works" built in a vacuum separated from the towns in the same vain as the towns themselves.

Pet Peeves:

- All the industrial factories "puffing" at the same time

- Firetrucks turning their lights off while "at the scene" with firefighters shooting water from their feet.

- The somewhat startling sun/shadow shift all at once at specific hours.

- Simlish is as gaudy as it is childish and dumb

- Business, industry and service signage and or flags were uninspired and ugly.

[osse84 18]

RE - snwboardn

snwboardn's review

My only complaints are

A) the path finding system really needs work... In real life you take a different road not because it is a shorter drive but because it offers less traffic.. I too had a major breakdown in my traffic because a moving van was blocking an intersection.I made a bypass hiway as best as I could around my city, but nobody used it because it wasn't the shortest distance...

Yes, they need to stop making that simplest approach to path finding. What is the point of simulating each and every sim/entity, if they can't make independent, smart choices anyway? Just stupid gimmicks and unnecessary waste of machine power.

Also, if the sim's commute range are as poor, or even poorer than in SC4, it would really piss me off. It is very annoying when they choose to make the game harder than it needs to be by making the commute system irrationally stupid. I'm not anticipating that this new SC will be very difficult, I'm just saying that if they want to add difficulty to the game, they should find other means than by dumbing down traffic.

Unfortunately since my computer is in service, I didn't get to try out the beta as much as I'd liked too. It didn't run very well on my old one. What I can say though is that I wasn't very impressed with the new gridless network dynamics. That was much better handled in CitiesXL.

[K-os 30]

Wasn't the whole agents thing supposed to make them smarter in finding jobs and improved school, fire, police radius or reach?? If they're still taking the shortest route what is the point?

I also just learned the game is only using 1 CPU core for the simulation. Dual core, i3, i5, i7, doesn't matter. Wow. Now we all know why everything is the way it is. Glassbox welcome to 2006.

[nervouspete 9]

nervouspete's Review:

Posted this up on a little forum out there somewhere to tip off some fellow Sim City fans as to wot I think. So, um, figured I'd repost it here, as I've been lurking so long...

Well, last weekend I happily got a shot at the SimCity beta. Now, I’m a really big fan of the Sim City series, with the fourth being the greatest in my opinion. The amount of detail you can achieve in Sim City 4 is pretty incredible, with you being able to create your own unique vision of a city - from rural towns with bushfire fire-fighting airfields to busy industrial ports and New England harbour resorts. There are thousands of custom buildings available online, many based on buildings both famous and unknown. Right down to the real life Cardiff Irish pub Dempsey's. It really is a huge game.

In holding up such a massive game as a comparison, a surface look at SimCity gives cause for worry. For one it looks a lot smaller, a lot less detailed and a lot, lot less mod-friendly. (Ooh, unintentional pun!) But I was itching to give it a go all the same, so I was very pleased when I got the chance to have a go on the beta.

The SimCity beta gives you a 25 minute tutorial (which is pretty boring) and a one hour free-play that you can repeat as many times as you like. I had time for a total of three plays over the weekend.

The first thing that hits you is how small the city tile is. The Maxis designers say that it is equivalent to a medium sized Sim City 4 tile, but in fact it seems a lot more like the smallest size. This is my biggest concern. I just don’t feel as if I’ll be able to get a natural feeling city with such a space constraint. By the time you hit skyscrapers you’ll have crowded out space for the suburbs with your CBD. There’ll be no smooth city-like transition from the burbs to the downtown. In one hour I managed to fill two thirds of it.

Now quite a few on the Simtropolis forum have said that this limitation kills the game for them. To be honest, it was a little close but in the end I worked with it. I’ve always been a slow developer in Sim City and I hate quickly zoning huge blocks. I like to work in more minute detail and more organically. In two days play I’ll just be reaching the 100,000’s. I actually enjoy the early stages of Sim City a hell of a lot, and have always been baffled at people’s keenness to reach skyscraper status early. Maybe it’s the small-town America fixation I have. One great thing about my beta experience is that I found I could make even more plausible suburbs than in SC4. True, my concern still stands that they’d be crowded out and redeveloped too soon, but the new curvy road building tools allowed me to give a really nice organic feel. I went for a radial pattern, with three circles of houses and artery spokes in the European manner. It looked neat, but I wish the houses didn’t fill up so much space with their barren back yards. There was too much room between buildings in my opinion. Also, the zoning is a little off. I like how you control density by road type, so big buildings will only grow alongside four lane streets and such, but the zone tool just shows a colour along the side of the road and gives no indication as to how much room your structures will take up. This is being fixed, apparently.

I still had room to set my industry to one side of the map and I zoned strips of commercial along the main artery. The Glassbox engine models each sim, so as one moves in it gets a job and starts working in one of the buildings. It will spend its money in the commercial zone. It will suffer accidents or illness from pollution in the industrial zone, and so on. This worked very transparently and very well. One neat moment was when a bunch of sims turned to crime and went out to rob a store. Other sims who had become policemen went and spoilt the party. There was a gunfight. An injured sim was taken to hospital in an ambulance, but it seemed that a traffic jam from a shonky network I built meant the poor hero died en route to the clinic. Cool. This is the kind of detail I like.

One great feature is the data visualisation. The data overlay shades your city to a glowing monochrome and by clicking on things like crime, electricity, unemployment you can really see in real time the fluctuations in data, pretty awesome. I particularly liked the air pollution, which you could see swinging around with the wind. It’s something the new game really nails.

So with my town reaching seven thousand I started plopping down civic buildings. A fun new feature is the modular additions you can plonk down on existing facilities. Need more power? Add a wind turbine to your plant. Need a larger feeder area for your school? Add school buses. Want a faster fire response time? Add a firehouse bell. These are fun and useful additions.

In addition, the city feels nicely alive. The traffic works really well and the population appears bustling. And you know it’s all simulated properly, which adds an extra ‘cool’.

I have to say though that some facilities seemed a little sloppy. The sewage outflow looked stupid, and although watching the sewage be sucked from your city through the data layer was both very amusing and oddly mesmerising, the actual building looked beyond retarded. Some of the buildings are somewhat ruined in looks by the modular add-ons too, as they don’t always seem to be really connected organically. The casino is a culprit in particular. It is not a game that Jonathan Meades would love.

Actually, he probably would.

How was the overall look? Well, it’s a lot more toy-town looking than Sim City 4. It just doesn’t look as real. However, I kind of enjoyed the look of the game. The tilt-shift can be switched off (I liked it on low) and you can apply some fun filters to alter the visual style, such as sepia, vintage, bleached, Sin City and so on. There’s a colourful, fun look to the game and it is visually very appealing. It also runs remarkably smoothly on my humble laptop, so it is very well optimised. I felt quite a lot of affection towards the look of my beta city. But I have to say, it never truly felt like a city in the way that Sim City 4 did. I felt it was a place, but a sort of stylised city, not quite real. I haven’t decided yet if this will grow to annoy me or not. But if it is not very real, at least it seems lived in. It’s fun to see little fire engines and ambulances zipping about, or garbage men picking up the trash and hauling it back to the landfill.

The textures were a little lacking in many places, and factories and stores had disappointingly generic signs, but I think this is merely a lack of polish in the beta and a sign of the small download – 2 gigabytes compared to the full games 12 gigabytes. I do hope that parks are improved though, they looked ugly as sin. Also intersections look rather off too, and driveways really need to merge in better with the road rather than end on a grass verge. The camera is both smooth and intuitive and the view zooms in to about five stories up. So while you cannot walk about your city you can at least immerse yourself in the bustle.

As to region play, this was of course locked off. You can see other cities in the distance and it looks kind of neat, but the inability to make a truly interlocking metropolis out of multiple cities is pretty disappointing. At least a good explanation was given on Reddit thread by a Maxis designer. He said that it looked fake when a neighbouring tile was adjacent due to the traffic suddenly disappearing, and they could never get the detailed view of a close up neighbour to match reality without the processing power being prohibitive. Despite this, I really wish that the tiles were not only bigger, but of a more irregular shape. The compulsion to fill a tile means there will be a lot of odd, square cities out there.

I didn’t get chance to dabble in mass transit much. There are buses and light rail but no subway. There have been complaints at these limitations but subways and monorails didn’t make an appearance until the SC4 expansion pack Rush Hour, which you had to pay for. I imagine it is well simulated however.

So, in all, what did I think? Well, it wins my cautious approval. It will never replace Sim City 4 as it simply isn’t as detailed enough in the ability to truly make any city you want. It is more toy-town than metropolis. Also, I fear that games will be on the short-and-sweet side and you won’t be given the satisfaction of truly nurturing a city over a period of weeks. Will this make of a short shelf-life? I’m not sure. It all depends on how many fresh challenges the complexity of the simulation can throw at you. On the plus side, it does look rather lovely and I did have genuine fun with it. It’s certainly obviously better than Spore. The music is rather fine too and in the old Sim City manner.

My instincts say that this will be best judged apart from Sim City 4, as a worthwhile desert rather than a main course. As such I’ll wait on the reviews and consensus and perhaps buy it when it is a smidgeon cheaper. It is after all a tad overpriced. The fantastically named Ocean Quigley, lead developer, says that mod support will be added later, but it remains to be seen as to whether EA will allow any threat to the inevitable micro-transactions store. Fingers crossed.

My verdict: Not as bad as feared, not as good as hoped. This wins a ‘Raised Eyebrows of Mild but Hesitant Approval’.

[Kythlyn 80]

I wouldn't call it a review, but I wrote my impressions of the first SimCity Closed Beta. It's fairly lengthy and includes images, so I hope you don't mind if I post a link instead of copy/paste.

 

Kythlyn's Impressions

http://gamerhorizon.com/simcity-closed-beta-impressions/

[memedoug85 36]

I do have alot to say but I'll keep it short for now...

It only took me a couple of goes to understand how the roads worked. Once i worked out what all the dotted lines were, everything lined up nicely. Even if you dont plan to have a road there its good to put it in as a guide for further development... Also after a couple of times I stopped zoning industry and started creating cities with only res and com. Higher density pops up everywhere with parks and schools. Try placing bus stops at almost every corner...

[brynhyfryd 222]

Now I have had a good play through the game I must admit it was better than expected.

 

However the Map size must be made bigger as I always filled up the map within 30 mins. The only way to keep busy is to focus on upgrading city services to push the density up. Parks can be a pain in the butt due to the sheer numbers needed and they take up a lot of the limited space. Graphics, Music and Animations are pretty good but noticed a few glitches which should get fixed in time.

 

I do like the ability to upgrade buildings but sometimes it feels like this becomes the primary focus in the game as time progresses.

 

Game play felt a bit static after a couple of hours play but should improve with the full game once all features are unlocked but I can't help thinking about fitting all those new buildings on such a small map and I assume this is the reason for city specialisation. Mass transit (buses) can be deployed across the whole map (city) with ease but there was not any real strategy needed which did feel a little disappointing so maybe EA could improve upon this.

 

Overall I would give this game a 6-7 out of 10. Its fun to play but its very different to previous Simcity titles.

[tomfoolery_79 85]

tomfoolery_79's review:

 

I only got to make 3 cities cause I got my key so late yesterday, but I did some thought comparison to the first beta weekend...here is my thoughts/questions.

 

1)  The game seemed more difficult this time.  The first beta weekend was EASY...by the end of the hour I had a city that was chugging along quickly and more money than I knew what to do with.  This time, I actually had to watch my funds and my buildings were more reluctant to grow up.  Fire, Police, Power, Health etc. also seemed more demanding and I had to actually monitor them.  For example, first beta weekend, I only needed 2 windmills by the end of the hour.  This time I needed 6 to keep up.  It could have been just me, but if they did ramp up the difficulty I'd say it's better.

 

2)  Less bugs, specifically, I had no graphical glitches at intersections especially and I got a lot in the first beta.  Good.

 

3)  The white road guides are still confusing to me as is the zoning.  Does the white line show where you put the roads or where you need to put every other road because the buildings back up to the one in the middle?  I'm sure I'll figure it out, but since we only had an hour I felt rushed to not try and figure it out.

 

4)  Parks can piggy back on each other, albeit not that gracefully, but they can.  Is this new?  I didn't see it first beta.  Placing parks almost instantly upgraded surrounding buildings.

 

5)  Art design is still cartoony, but I've gotten used to them and it didn't bother me as much.

 

6)  I still do not like zoning being restricted to the kind of road it's on, nor is the zoning tool as intuitive as SC4 (even with the recent tweak showing depth).  If it's not broke, why fix it?

 

7)  My thoughts on city size hasn't changed one iota...it's SMALL.

[PeterWeaver 2]

Jonathan Meades would possibly like it, there's lots of stuff to stand back and admire in the tutorial

 

I bought SC4 with the new version in mind and enjoyed it. Keyword here though is: clunky, although the retro feel seems appropriate

 

What I've seen and the little I've played have ignited the warm glow one thought might have dimmed, very beautiful simulation of a world in there. Within the city bounds of course

[efgrib 45]

RE: Spatzimaus

Gameplay: A bit less heavy on the micromanagement than previous SimCity games, for better or worse. The fact that it's using an agent-based modeling system makes it a better simulation than previous games, although this adds its own headaches (like a permanent traffic jam that led to a sizeable part of my city burning down). We didn't last long enough to see how the economy works for a developed city, but you could see many distinct paths to financial success, instead of SC4's simplicity. The downside, to me, was in that lack of micromanagement; with so little control over the actual buildings being placed, it didn't feel like I would DO as much as in previous games, but in a way that helped as it freed my attention for infrastructure management.

I agree it was much more micromanagement than previous games, but i really thought it was great. I was able to see the flow of power to each building in my city. With that i was able to see trouble spots in my city, where maybe the agents were being used up before they got to a specific location. resulting in brownouts in spots. This allowed me to easily spot fix things before i really messed up and had city wide power failures. The economy is, from what i experienced, a delicate balance between different densities bewteen each RCI zone. While i wasnt able to test this, seeing as how i was rushing to build as much as i could within the hour, I was able toward the end of beta, to maintain a balance of demand for each zone. As such one of my last citied did break the 100K population mark. I did have an issue with some of the ploppable buildings such as schools, becoming land hogs as you expanded them. They simply took up far too much space.

I also agree that the tiles are a bit too small. I was also able to stuff the city full in half an hour time, however i do believe this hindered a lot of us in the beta, simply because we built everything quickly, the game simply didnt have time to figure out what the density is goint to be. In one game, i simply built one little square block that maybe took up a tenth or less of the total tile, and i did see it was easier to control the density of this small square than if i had rushed and built the entire tile up. In a half an hour on this test, this small city block reached skyscrapers and 40K population in a little over 30 minutes. I believe this is because when you create limited space for people to move into, the demand will go up quickly. Then add a park or something to increase the density of a certain income level, and immediately much larger buildings are formed and the population starts rising until the next plateau. However, when you set the entire tile with roads and zones, there is no demand since sims can pick and chose where they want to live. In the time it took to fill the entire tile with residents and increase the demand for more density, the hour was almost up and you have a massive 2kX2k town of 20k people. In essence the one hour time limit was in itself a pitfall.

I also noticed education plays quite a big part in this game. In my first few games i has a LOT of abandoned commercial and industrial buildings and almost all of them had closed due to no management available to staff the business. When i started building more schools, people became better educated, and my abandoned buildings went down to 0. Also as a side effect, businesses boomed, technology level advanced and density increased.

 

Aesthetics: Graphics and sound were both very nice. It's not as "realistic" as SC4's style, and not as cartoony as the earlier SimCity games, but works well in-between. The buildings were a bit bland, but we've seen screenshots showing how building styles alter to fit your city's specialization, which we didn't have a chance to try out for ourselves. The "island" region layout was disconcerting, with huge green spaces in-between, but I'd be okay with that if the devs filled that space with purely cosmetic small towns or suburban sprawl. And while I was never a fan of the Sims, I had no problems with the Simlish speech.

Honestly the graphics to me were fine. Yes they were a bit cartoony and could be a bit more realistic. The buildings were only bland in the beginning. As the density rises and large skyscrapers were build, the buildings looked much more polished. I figure it is like any other game out there where the top level stuff is the best looking. You dont start a new character in World of Warcraft, and immediately get nice shinies. You start off with crap gear and you have to work for the better looking stuff. Same with this game. I started off with nasty trailer parks, but eventually developed apartments, then skyscrapers. My skyscrapers were gorgeous and it was making me giggle every time one popped up.

As for the region play, I again think we were given only a sample of what a region could be. If you look up some internal testing vids or even some of the official teaser vids, some of the regions i have seen have twice or thrice what we had in our Beta region. I think it is going to be a blast to be able to build like 10 different cities all in the same region and each with their own specialty. If you think about it, Sim City is looking more like Sim State.

I had a few bugs where the game wouldnt alow me to zone in places where there was no reason that i couldnt zone there. In one game the game wouldnt let me zone at all and i had to start a new game to fix it.

Most of your problems seems to be user error as the game gives you the tools to monitor your power and water to see if you will soon be running low. With these tools, if used properly, you can plan ahead and fix problems before they even arise. If you were getting massive blackout, it isn't the games fault that you didn't pay attention to the power gauge and see you had progressively less and less of a surplus so you could take action before you ran out completely. Same thing with the clinic. You can click on the hospital icon and see how many people died, got sick, got injured, and were treated each day. If you see big numbers in the death department, you know what to do. If you click on the clinic itself, you can see if the beds are filling and if so, expand the building before people b1tch and moan.

But in all honesty, I really can't blame you for that error, considering there is a crapload to monitor and with just an hour to do as much as you can, it is very difficult to keep an eye on these things if you are rushing to build roads and stuff. Once the game is released and we have all the time in the world and we will be able to take our time with our cities and it will be easier to manage all these things and i bet you will not run into the same problem.

 

Interface: Generally pretty good, but there were some annoyances. Placing large structures, like schools or a baseball diamond, just seemed harder than they should have been. The road grid was useful but too hard to bring up, and it'd key off the road type your mouse was near instead of the road type you were placing. And while it was easy to find out the likes and dislikes of your current residents, it was too hard to find out things like, why is building X still stuck in a low-density, low-wealth state when it's got everything needed to evolve into a nice mid-wealth apartment building?

Beyond that, there are just a few things I'd wish for. If not a save/load function, then at least some rudimentary moving options for if you find out that grade school you placed should have been just a little bit further to the left...

OMG i know! The schools seemsed insanely massive once you maxed out its expansion. Also some of the parks and sporting venues were equally massive and the range of effect of these didnt seem to be worth it as it didnt stretch that far for how much space a simple baseball diamond took up.

I found the road grid annoying as all hell. I would be trying to snake a road and the road would automatically snap to a grid line away from where i want it to go. I tried looking in the options for a way to turn this off, but i didnt see any. As for the problem with why you have a trailer park in a place with high income modifiers, well i kinda explained that above. The Residential and Commercial zones had 3 demand meters for each income level. If the high income demand was low, then that is why you see trailer parks there that are not evolving. Also another factor is the space you provided for said building to expand. Sometimes the buildings around it will expand into high density buildings, but they leave that trailer no room to expand. If you click on it, it might say something like, "No room to increase density." So you see, it is trying to increase, but there just isnt room. I found out that spacing residential zoning out helped this, instead of just painting the entire road green.

I have seen a number of posts about the "dead space" in the game, but that dead space is needed for buildings to expand and grow. This isnt 1980s Sim City where buildings are confined to the red R square and at most 2 of those squares comine for a large hotel. In this game you must provide the space for your city to grow. this is why my lottle city block did so well and grew so fast, because it had the demand and the space to go for it.

I really think there is a lot we have to discover with this game. I think we were given a teaspoon to taste from the lake that is this game. I have a suspicion that there is so much you can do with this game, that the devs know that you wont be able to spend time on terraforming or stuff like that. There will be so much to do and monitor that having massive cities much larger than the 2k x 2k tiles we have, will be impossible to monitor and manage. In some of my cities where i filled the tile, by the time i finished fixing the problem for residents on one side of the city, another 2 would pop up about stuff to be fixed. I dont know what i would do if i had just double what we had.

 

 

 

exactly what I think!

[ohwellariel 3]

Ohwellariel's review:

 

This game delivers with one hand, and takes away with the other. On one hand you have a much improved under-the-hood simulator compared to SC4, which really allows for an incredible amount of micromanagement, even down to the level of individual companies or sims. On the other hand, it doesn't feel like a city sim because of the small scale, graphics style, inability to customize the entire region or terraform, and the difficulty of the game is much reduced (near impossible to fail).

 

I made four cities in the second closed beta, and I think what it comes down to is that the goals of the game are very different than SC4. In SC4, the only victory condition was making things just the way you wanted. The game and community did an amazing job giving you the tools to achieve that goal, whatever it was for you. This game, by contrast, is much more like a SimCity MMO. You cannot save, you have a somewhat persistent always-on world, and the goals are to compete with other cities on leaderboards, and to some extent to show off what you've done. Notice the built in video sharing and extensive stylistic options. It's a SimCity version of /inspect, aiming to make vanity a driver for continued play just like in MMOs.

 

I understand now why they are requiring an internet connection. This game does not have the tools in place to be a good single player game like SC4 was, and it can't really be played like that very successfully. While the city management aspect is fun and improved, SC5 sacrifices a lot of its lego-style capabilities for social, MMO-like interactions. The big question, which the beta was unable to properly answer, is whether forcing everyone into multiplayer is worth giving up so much single player control. I intend to buy the game a couple weeks after launch, when people have had a chance to answer that question.

[TaxNL 0]

Due to server problems I was only able to play 2 city's. I want second screen options. Why can't I go to my second screen whe the game runs?

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Ln X's review

I have played the simcity franchise for many years now and I was only a little boy when I first started playing Simcity 2000, that was a real blast to play and then game Simcity 3000 which was even more fun. When SC4 came I spent months trying to figure it out but the steep learning curve paid off and provided me with many countless weeks of fun. In this review I'll start with a list of pros and cons, then I'll explain my experience of the game and hopefully bust a few misperceptions going around this forum about the game, and finally give my overview and score.

Pros:

• The laying down of zoning and roads is both easy and very simple.
• Frame rate runs smoothly even with high graphical settings and a densely packed city.
• The interface does not get in the way and finding everything merely takes an hour at most to become familiar with.
• Utilities and non-RCI structures are simple to place.
• Street view!
• Easy to move around with the camera.
• Adding modular features to non-RCI structures.
• The simulator is rock solid.
• Colourful graphics make the city more appealing to the eye.
• The tones and textures of buildings are rather detailed close up.
• Rarely are there pop-ups.
• Wealth levels and wealth displacement are intact.
• Sewage and wind direction.
• The occasional random disaster.
• The way new RCI buildings are constructed.
• Little repetition of RCI buildings.
• A plethora of graph porn.
• Advisors don't get in the way.
• If you're neglecting a certain service or utility it will be highlighted in the interface.
• The city will burn down and people will desert the buildings if you are negligent in your duties as mayor.
• If you tax people or businesses to death they will leave (unlike SC4).
• Some funny building names.
• What with the sims and cars your city looks more life-like.
• Recreational areas are differentiated by wealth type.
• Upgradeable roads.
• Beautiful trees and grassy textures.
• Not once did Origin get in the way.
• Finance is more or less the same as SC4.

Cons:

• It only takes thirty minutes to cover most of the city tile.
• City tiles aren't contiguous.
• Querying RCI buildings does not tell you the occupancy numbers.
• In a far out zoom some of the linkages of straight roads turn into this brown colour.
• Sometimes scrolling back and forth does not work.
• There are no zone density options.
• Density is based upon desirability.
• No powers lines or water pipes.
• No highways or subways.
• Reduced props.
• Only one neighbour connection.
• No terraforming.
• No lifespan for utilities.
• A laggy internet connection could mean Origin won't run the game properly.
•  

Critique of the gameplay

When I first started on the beta my expectations were low but once I moved on from the tutorial (which wasn't really necessary actually!) and got my mitts on road building and laying down zones I was astounded by how simple it all was. The white markers are really useful and initially the first fifteen minutes played out just like SC4; let your zones develop, raise some cash and go easy on the non-utility buildings (schools, hospitals etc...). When I started adding the more refined amenities I realised that the basic principles of this simulator are almost exactly like that of SC4. You have your wealth types, the needs of each particular zone type, wealth type and so forth and things like wealth displacement (where higher wealth residents or businesses 'kick out' their lower wealth counterparts), desirability and all that were all there.
 
I'm not sure if this game has been dumbed down (it was undoubtedly easy due to being a veteran of SC4) but SC4 becomes ridiculously easy once you start using neighbouring cities, understand desirability and RCI mechanics; you can do whatever you want with the game. Again SC5 doesn't have quite a steep learning curve as SC4 and that's probably because the detection of city problems has been made easier (though I'd say there are just as many potential problems to crop up in this game as there are in SC4), but I definitely felt that there was far more maintenance; keeping an eye on utility demand and on ones civics. Eventually you'll get to the stage where you have run out of room to build and this is where we come to the first (and to my surprise only) major problem of this game.
 
I actually don't mind the city tile size, sure 4*4 or even 8*8 would be nice but the lack of contiguous city tiles is going to severely cramp your style if you want to create big cities or recreate your hometown. Now you can do that in a piecemeal approach if the city tiles were contiguous and that would be one hell of a challenge balancing everything out while saying recreating a major city; it would keep you going for weeks on end! Sadly contiguous tiles were rejected because apparently it would be no fun staring at neighbouring 'dead' city tiles. I must disagree with this, and whatever the problems, either have a neighbouring city in which you can't see any cars or sims, OR have them frozen to illustrate the timewarp effect which makes regional play possible. I personally would not care if vehicles disappeared to another city tile because the trade-off is a view where you see the whole region which would be SO AWESOME!!!
 
I did try out neighbouring cities and the RCI demand is both catered for and extrapolated ala SC4 style so that's alright, and it looks okay seeing your other city in the distance but as I said above; contiguous tiles. The true magic of SC4 was the region view and how everything connected together, and had this applied to SC 2013 (again; orgasm!) well... The lack of contiguous tiles will severely restrict what SC4 allowed you to do; the artistic creation of a virtual city. It will cut your play time of a region from say several months down to a couple of weeks.
 
Next up I'm going to let you in on some of the mechanics of this game which I discovered after five hours of usage, remember this is strictly observational and what I thought was the cause may not be so, but even so listen up as you may this useful when you're playing the finished game!
 
Firstly density is determined by two factors: road type and desirability. Just want a swathe of small buildings? Simple just use a network of low capacity streets so that no matter what the desirability the building won't upgrade to a higher density. And -- get this -- you can upgrade or downgrade streets and avenues by clicking the upgrade tool in the transport menu, thus you won't have to rip up entire zones upgrading your road system (Cities XL cough cough) and if you planned decently you won't need to build any more avenues either because commute times and journeys appear to be more reasonable in this game. So there is no need for low density cities to have mainly avenues as seen in various screen shots; streets or even dirt roads will do quite nicely thank you! Thus you can build rather realistic-looking cities (pardon me towns) with an infrastructure which isn't overkill.
 
Concerning zoning you needn't worry too much; if you correctly used the whitelines to ensure a symmetrical distance between two streets then you can have a very snug grid system or curved grid system. Either way for low density you can fit in the maximum amount of buildings filling up ALL the space and have no worries about these buildings upgrading to higher density. Just like in SC4 bigger RCI buildings automatically realign the parcels (something which is used in this game) so the new parcel size can accommodate the bigger building, thus if you have created a snug grid system you won't have to rip up any roads to cater for the space these bigger buildings take up. Again zoning and the implementation of roads has been thought out very well. The most useful road pieces you'll find will have to be straight and freeform (and when I say freeform be sure to have a firm grip of that mouse otherwise you'll have some really wriggly curved roads!), once you have some dotted lines (the space between which shrinks with lower capacity roads) laying down the streets/avenues is a piece of cake. You can easily go for precision to ensure full utilisation of the space you have got.
 
Concerning parks and desirability, ones recreation facilities are now divided into wealth types which I think is a really great idea. However each type isn't solely devoted to one class per se. It seems the higher class of recreation facilities correlates to an exponentially higher desirability boost for lower wealth residential types. I say this because low wealth residents released a mass of green happy smilies above their houses when medium or high wealth recreation facilities were placed. Conversely the higher the wealth the less of the effect (and area of effect) said recreation facilities provide, also they are the ONLY means in which to attract on masse medium and high wealth residents. But watch out! You could suffer some serious depopulation as lower wealth residents are kicked out (hooray for inequality!) for there more wealthier peers and this causes some radical changes for your industry which will incur a dearth of the workers needed to make their products and run their assembly lines. I say this because population density is inversely proportional (to a small amount) to wealth type of residents (just like in SC4). Also schools and healthcare are not the primary generators of desirability but you will need them if you want your uptight posh citizens to stay in your city.
 
Also city planning has become quite a bit more cooler because a very important factor is -- would you believe it -- wind! Yes, in your city there is this god who ensures the wind travels in the same speed and direction and this is important because wind carries with it smells and air pollution. Thus if you place your industry, power plants and garbage facilities on the edge of the map where the wind will blow the particulates and stench away, then the land value effect (and health effect) is considerably lessened and the radius of effect is -- for all intents and purposes -- negligible and you can place your residential offensively close to industry (take that NIMBY!). Conversely if you are one lazy SOB of a mayor and place your industry any old place, the pollution will drift over a sizeable chunk of your city destroying land value for medium and high wealth residents, and causing a rash of sickness and respiratory illness. This is a considerable improvement when compared with SC4's way of doing things (I mean you were god in SC4 yet you had no control over the weather?) concerning pollution.
 
This brings us to SC 2013's strongest trump card; it is a very lively dynamic game. Everything is simulated (agent-based simulator) and when you get up close and play it on Cheetah, it feels like you're watching Koyaanisqatsi what with the fast moving cars and sims (especially in the night) (how cool would be if vehicles had light streaks when on faster speeds of the simulation). If you don't keep an eye on things your city will decay and suffer, and unlike SC4 (or more precisely to a greater extent) without your intervening hand your city WILL NOT repair itself of its own accord. Say for instance there has been some fires or a wave of closures of commercial buildings, you are left with rubble which you have to clean and buildings which you must demolish (demolition is really fricken cool in this game as buildings now implode and crumble (not explode into pieces!)), this will take up a bit of space if you let things hang. Sadly utilities don't have a lifespan so the only time you have to remember them is when you have to upgrade their generation capacity (be that water, power, sewage or garbage disposal).
 
Health is now a very important part of this game, neglect it and a few hundred sims will die every day cycle (24 hour period) and it can scare away higher wealth residents if you're not too careful. Health is also an ever changing situation because as your city develops at the same time the air pollution (and other types of pollution) encroach ever more to the point where you could have a contaminated water supply which could overload your hospitals with a wave of sick sims.
 
I must emphasise that contrary to what has been said by people (I'm not talking about the developers or Maxis here) about density and how it works you DO have a very strong degree of control over who lives in your city and whether you go for a lowdown urban sprawl, a conglomeration of apartments and office blocks, or a mass of skyscrapers and massive industry (which I've yet to see due to the inability in beta to upgrade to a high capacity street type (ya see road capacity DOES restrict RCI density)), or a big fat slum full of dirty industry. Just like in SC4 (I must sound like a broken record repeating this phrase) you have full control over how your city develops, the simulator doesn't automatically force your hand and the same applies with SC 2013. Again your only limitation is tile size and the lack of contiguous tiles (which even if small could give the appearance of one continuous city or urban area).
 
With a high graphical setting the tones and textures don't look so cartoony but I like the exaggerated colours because it's not trying to be completely real-looking. You see the human mind has this thing for artistic imperfection, we yearn for more realism yet when we obtain it we find it less memorable and it fails to stir up our imagination. SC4's colour scheme stands out, it isn't too outlandish and the colours and tones match the areas of the city: darker dirtier colours around industry, greys and blues for office blacks, brick colours and wood colours for residential. The colour scheme seems mood related and for me it works well. I haven't tried any of the colour filters and I didn't need to; the suburb lighting and shadows is the counterbalance to the somewhat cartoony colours.
 
Finally, going off in a tangent, the largest city I managed to build had a population of 80000 and it was a slum but just like in SC4 slums have the highest population density. Now this equates to a population density of 20000 sims per square kilometre (on average). Now where I live (Darlington, UK) has a population of a 106000 and a population density of about 500 per square kilometre (on average) Since the city I created was covered in apartment blocks which would have at least ten times the number of residents than your average two-storey family home in about the same space, then I guess the population density is only off by a factor of four times so there's some food for thought for all you SC guys who are obsessed with how accurately each simcity game represents a city.

 

 

Conclusion

 

To sum up I say this game is a VERY worthy successor to SC4, it combines all the cool features of Cities XL with the deep simulator of SC4, plus adds some and refines how one constructs road infrastructure and zones (using Ctrl with zoning and demolishing greatly speeds up the process). Again the small city tile size is not TOO big of a detriment and you can get all too easily lost just staring close-up at your creation and using the camera to roam above the streets and suddenly your city starts feeling rather large! The neighbouring cities serve some purpose with specialisation (which I tried a bit) and works just like SC4, the simulator is rock solid, the graphics are really good and the city looks alive!
 
All we need are 4*4 tiles and contiguous city tiles (plus terraforming to and even more RCI buildings 'cos I'm greedy) and this game WILL BE A MONSTER!!! It will be the ultimate Simcity game appealing to veterans and newbies alike. This is one engaging simulator which is only constrained by size and how the region city tiles are laid out. More remarkably there were very few noticeable bugs and the frame rate performance was rock solid no matter what you built upon the city and no matter how high the graphical settings were.
 
To conclude I would give this game a 8.5 out of 10 just on the beta alone. Throw in 4*4 tiles, neighbouring tiles and terraforming and this game will -- quite safely -- be a 10. I'm not just saying that you know, I've had a great deal of experience with Simcity and this game is the future and for it to be limited by only three things (need I repeat myself) is not all that disheartening considering how at least two of the three could be immediately addressed in an expansion pack, and EA and Maxis it would make sense to have contiguous city tiles- just think of all that additional multiplayer fun (wink wink).
 
After five of hours of nirvana, I am now a believer in Glassbox and the direction Maxis went in with the simulator. This game beats the s*** out of Cities XL and I really hope this game sells well so we can have an expansion pack to address the three main limitations I pointed out in this review.
 
I am definitely buying this game when it comes out on the 8th of March!
 
And that folks is my two cents...

[niac123 25]

Niac123's Review

 

There are some strong points to this game, and some negative points. But before I get into that, I just like to point out that I don't think it's right to compare this to simcity 4. they are very different games... but in a good way...

I want to also say, that, like me, you love the sims series, especially the sims 3, you will love this game. It is just macromanagement of the sims 3. Anybody reading this though, don't discredit me. I've been playing  simcity on and off for the past 6 years, so I consider myself to be a valid opinion.

 

Pro's

the gameplay engine is great. I like how things flow. there truly are consequences for your actions. if you have a big traffic jam, police may not be able to catch a criminal in time, bus waits will go up etc. this was great for a rich gameplay.

The game is beautiful there is not doubt about that. The graphics may not be realistic per se, but it looks like the most perfect model city. This is another thing that puts it aside from Simcity 4.

The road tool is so very detailed. It's almost overwhelming. Laying roads is even more of an art form than it was before.

It's easy: many people hate this. I actually like this. One thing that I hated about simcity 4 was that I constantly fought with the game for some stupid reason. This doesn't happen here.

It's addicting. Seriously. You cannot help but sit there staring at your screen until you earn the necessary $20000 to build a fire station.

There's always something to do. A.k.a. there's always a problem to solve. So this means that, unlike in simcity 4, when you reach a good city size, you won't just gaze at it and then move on.

the Modules make things much more intimate. it's great being able to place just one hospital, or just one school and upgrade it yourself you don't have to place anymore.

Zoning is easy. there is no doubt about that.

I like that density is linked to road capacity. this means that the city will solve it's own problems with commute time. I'm sick and tired of seeing those damned zots and abandoned buildings.

the Online portion looks absolutely promising. I hated the idea, but it's execution seems to me to be a very cool source of competition, trade, and communication. I won't feel like a prisoner to my own game.

 

Con's

 

ROADS ARE BUGGY. Yes I said that they are great, and that's true, HOWEVER, the bugginess is hard to get over in itself. I spent a good 5 minutes of the 60 minute city trying make road systems that should work fit together. this is especially terrible in the city with two tiers that they let us use.

It's not graphically perfect. there are many mismatched pixels, invisible roads, and cringeworthy textures.

the City size is almost a dealbreaker. It's seriously small. they better get bigger with an EP. It's really limiting. My sims were asking for a municipal airport and I couldn't help but wonder where the hell I would put it. I hate demolishing buildings. It's my pet peeve.

the modules are glitchy as well.

There are many unsolvable problems. There were many instances where my sims didn't get any power, yet there was 72 Watts of excess power. I could only deduce that it was because there was a traffic congestion. But that doesn't make any sense. but Anyways, when I tried to bypass.the main route.... I was having problems with the road system. grrrr...

 

All in all, great game. I will be playing both Simcity (2013) and Simcity 4 for a long time since they are so unique. Here's a pic for my end.

 

[jcinsj 5]

Well I spent $60 on a game I can't play.  Has to be a first.  Did EA rip me off?  Of course, just like the rest of the world my play time is at peak hours.  I'm not going to be playing this game at 3AM.  So, am I allowed to access the European servers?  When I try all the game tiles save I can't load a game.  When I try to access an American server, it says, its busy and counts down a clock of 20 minutes.  Thing is after the 20 minutes, it start the count down over again.  Really stupid.  Really a waste of money.  If I can't get on the servers tomorrow, I am going to demand my $60 back.  I think my expectations were that this game would allow for single-player use.  I don't see it.  From what 5 minutes I was on-line before I got bumped off, it looks a hell of a lot like Cities XL 11 only at one point they had to drop the "servers" as people got sick of not being able to find the city they wanted.  So far I'm extremely disappointed that I paid so much and that I can't get on a server to play.  Or even that when I try to create my own city it says "city not available".

Very unhappy SimCity fan here.  I've been playing the game since the first version, which is over 15 years and think this one sucks.

[ShadeSigma 16]

I'm not here to make fun of no one or put on a "I told you so" front, but I'm actually pissed for everyone who did buy the game. You could have taken that $60 or $80 and bought 3 or 4 different games. Not only were there 10 people displaying more cons than pros, but there were thousands of people saying the very same thing. If a thousand people are saying something's wrong, obviously you would want to consider it right? 

 

As of now I am reading that a lot of people can't even play the game. New PC games usually cost around $40-$50 depending--but they want $60 on this game. AND, $80 to boot for a deluxe edition containing building sets that would get modded into the game eventually. Yeah. Those guys are really trying to get paid this year. I am VERY happy I decided to do my research at the very last minute. I was looking on Gamestop.com and I saw a guy give the game a 5 on the rating meter.

 

I was like, WTH? A 5?? Yeah right. This guy has a problem. But when I logged back in on here, and various other sites, the reviews were disappointing. I was very excited for this game--that I just assumed they'd get it right. But I was so wrong. I really hope you guys can get your money back. And if you got it from Gamestop it's most likely you probably won't. They don't accept used PC games.

[niac123 25]

I'm glad I'm waiting a few days to buy the game. XD