I different approach to City building, but like the other city builder (only one other), it is missing some things.

User Rating: 7.5 | City Life PC
By 360motina | Review Date:
City Life deals with the social aspect of a city and the inter-class struggles and conflicts. This is actually easier than it sounds, especially starting off with the two subcultures, the fringes (artists) and blue collars. It actually seems like an odd starting with the fringes, but you can.. some how? Any small town I have been to, and actually have been raised one has been exclusively a blue collar area. Of course there is also the third group of Have Nots, but they can be a little hard to get, despite your city depending on them for some of the buildings interestingly enough. And you need them to get the full return on those buildings. I’ll cover this later. Now obtaining the other subcultures can take on a challenge, and is not something you want to do right away, even when you get certain building unlocked. But once you figure out how to maintain the support building like the larger schools, shopping, hospitals, etc it is not really that hard.
It would be nice if the shopping service actually gave a return. They can be really draining.
The issue of traffic is rather simple.. a little too simple, and unrealistic. Not needing to tear down any buildings for a three lane highway/road/street or whatever is somewhat of an impossibility, or they could have just retextures the lower densities. Having huge sidewalks on a lower density part of the neighbourhood is not realistic at all. It seems the issue of streets is a problem in any city simulation game. I hate how bus stops and subways are handled the same way as SimCity. They do not take up that much room, or if they do take up room, they are much larger than that. Why they cannot be incorporated in the street is beyond me. Then again, with the three lane streets, there is no room even for a side walk. The biggest improvement is in the ability to put streets in any direction possible, now the only problem that arises in this is placing them so that you can efficiently plop in the buildings. Starting off with such a small budget, this is not really a viable option to stat off with.
Fire is simply annoying. SimCity excelled at this at least, well past SC2000. In City Life, fire spreads like fire in SC2000, but is handled lamest possibly way, and takes for ever to put out.
The game is aesthetically pleases, and the building are rather not bad looking either, despite not having much variation and leading to extreme redundancy and making the city look rather boring.
The lack of map generation is the same as SimCity 4, and the size o the maps is limiting, and once you fill them up, and even unlock them is limiting, although still taking some time to play through them.
Overall I like the game, but it has never given the enthusiasm as SimCity or the time well spent, plus Simcity 4 is highly customizable, but perhaps some time need to pass before such features are found in order to mod the game, but I have not looked into that. It is nice to see some more variety, and hopefully some major improvements happen to SimCity 5, despite the idea Will Wright gave out in making the next one more simplified, if they decide going forth with a next one.

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