The latest edition to the SimCity franchise has arrived, and it’s worth the wait. SimCity 4, the fourth instalment of the popular PC game franchise, arrives 15 years after the original SimCity and is the direct follow-up to the highly successful SimCity 3000.
SC4 proves to be highly entertaining and includes a level of detail never before seen in this genre. You are charged with planning, building and managing a city; presented with a barren landscape, it is your goal to create a happy and profitable home for your citizens.
For those unfamiliar with SimCity, there are detailed tutorials that teach you how to alter your landscape (through a process known as terraforming) and then you’re ready to begin building your dream city. You will need to start off by building a power plant and zoning some land for residential, commercial and industrial use: Then sit back and watch sims (simulated humans) flock to your burgeoning metropolis.
This might sound simple enough, and to start with it is, but anything can — and probably will — go wrong. During the course of the game, you will have to deal with many challenges, from industrial action to traffic congestion, from pollution to funding your education system. There will also be tough decisions to make: Should you allow the army to build that nuclear missile base within your city territory? Although the extra monthly income is beneficial, how will your citizens react?
One of the biggest departures from the previous versions of SimCity is how you begin the game. To start, you are presented with ‘SimNation’, a collection of blank landscapes where you can choose in which region to begin your city. In SC4, you are God and Mayor: You are given a blank landscape to create your view of how a city should be. Start off by creating rolling plains or vast mountain ranges in God mode before you establish your city and install yourself as Mayor.
The SC4 game interface is well laid out and although the control buttons are not very intuitive, after a quick run through of the Mayor tutorial you will find it easy to manage your city and access the various information resources available. Although at times you will find the flood of information unmanageable, the key to the game is identifying the critical information and acting on it accordingly.
One of the greatest challenges will be to manage the budgets within your city, knowing how to get extra funds and when to cut back on spending. As each city is established, you are given a budget of 100,000 simoleons. Although this sounds a lot, it is critical that you spend wisely and always leave enough in the vaults to get you through those tight times.
To help you cope with the awesome task of micromanaging your sprawling city, SC4 provides you with a panel of advisors who can provide good counsel on everything from finance to city planning, crime rates to pollution levels.
The one truly striking feature of SC4 is the amazing level of detail. You can zoom in on your city from far above and watch your sims as they go about their daily tasks of going to work or shopping. You can also go as far as moving in your own sim and through the scrolling news menu on screen, they will report back to you on your new city, letting you know about the employment situation, healthcare coverage and even whether or not there is traffic congestion on the streets.
SC4 is by far the best instalment thus far of the hugely popular franchise. However, some of the changes that have been made may not go down well with the veteran SimCity community. In previous versions, you could take control of cities that had already been developed and you were faced with certain scenarios in order to test your city management abilities, something that is currently missing from SC4.
There also appears to be some compatibility issues with certain graphics cards, which may cause lag problems when scrolling or zooming in on your city. Regardless of these minor problems, SC4 certainly lives up to the hype that has surrounded it throughout its development with the end result that Maxis have once again created a game that will lead to many sleepless nights and lost weekends.Specs:
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers