Sim City 4 Review (no fat)

Game Description

The origins of this successful series dates back to the time of the ZX Spectrum…if anybody can remember that. The original game, Sim City put you in the role of a mayor and you had the responsibility to build up a city and make sure that all the factors involved in maintaining your creation (water, food, education, security etc) are running smoothly.

The original game concept didn’t change in the sequels, the developers only added more and more features and elements to play with. The latest in the sequels, Sim City 4 brings more significant changes than it’s predecessors and provides for greatly improved graphics. However, the core of the game mechanics remain untouched.

Sim City 4 – Gameplay

A major change introduced by Sim City 4 are the regions. The world map is divided into regions and you can establish a city in each region. You can connect neighbor cities with roads and make deals between them, for example one city can export surplus electrical power to neighbor cities. The size of a single region is limited so the only way to establish a huge metropolis is by building it up in multiple regions and interconnecting them.

Before starting a new city, you can customize the terrain. When you open up an empty region you enter the god mode and get access to various landscape creation tools. You can make mountains vanish or raise them, create a lake or a river, put animals and much more. After you have finished, the next step is establishing a city, taking up the role of mayor and making it grow before your eyes.

Sim City doesn’t go into the details of placing each individual house by hand. You need to see the big picture, and only establish the residential, industrial and commercial zones.

As people move in, buildings appear gradually and they get bigger as the city grows and the Sims living in the city accumulate wealth. There are many factors needed to successfully run a city. You need to establish power plants, water conduits, public transport and as the city grows the inhabitants’ needs will increase gradually. You’ll need fire departments, police stations, schools, universities, hospitals. People also need parks and recreational areas to be happy. Another very important factor to consider is pollution. Place residential zones near industrial buildings and the people living there will start moving out soon.

Sim City 4 –Wanted: Deep Pockets!

As every new mayor will experience, everything costs money…a lot of money. As more and more services are added to the city, controlling the expenses becomes increasingly difficult. Although you have several advisors to help you, they only give warnings when something is going wrong. How to resolve the problem is still the mayor’s job. This can become frustrating to the average player but passionate city builders will love the challenge.

After you’ve worked countless hours on building up a metropolis what could be more fun than destroying it in the most destructive ways possible? By entering god mode you get access to various tools of mass destruction, ready to be unleashed on your city: tornado, volcano, earthquake, a giant robot and more. They all look spectacular and it’s a welcome relaxation after a lot of hard work For anyone willing to test his city against natural, and not so natural, disasters, the disaster mode is still an interesting option to see how your people and emergency services deal with the situation.

Sim City 4 - A Personal Touch

Another entirely new feature introduced is that the player is now able to observe the lives of individual sims. You can see when your chosen sim goes to work, where he lives. You can see when he moves or gets fired and how he feels about living in the city. It’s even possible to import characters from The Sims and watch them live and work. This certainly adds a new, more personal feel to this city builder game.

Sim City 4 – Visuals

Sim City 4 takes a big leap in graphics compared to Sim City 3000. It features very detailed 3D cities and landscapes. There is also a day/night cycle implemented which gives more realism to the game. You can zoom in very close observing individual sims go to work, relax in the park or even play basketball. Also you can really zoom out viewing your whole city, this is especially interesting at night with hundreds of lights glowing. The simulation of life in the city is also impressive. All this takes its toll though, because it eats up significant system resources. So in order to run a big city smoothly you’ll need a pretty solid PC.

Sim City 4 – Summing Up

The amount of fun you can derive out of this game is directly proportional to your liking for building games… strategy buffs will love it. Nice and peaceful.

Sim City 4 - Cost

Sim City 4 currently retails for $23.95US or you can get the Deluxe Edition for $29.99US at the time of writing.