SimCity 4 Updated Preview
We take a hands-on look at the next game in the long-running city-building series, which promises to add gameplay depth and a new, simpler interface.
A lot has changed since 1989, not least of which is SimCity. The series has undergone a couple of major overhauls since the classic city-building game was first released. Each new SimCity game has improved the graphics and added a lot of new stuff to build, from underground water mains to sky-high 3D buildings, but the game remained fundamentally the same through the 1999 edition, SimCity 3000. That's changing with SimCity 4, which is now nearing completion and is due out next month. While SimCity 4 will be familiar to anyone who's played previous games in the series, it does extend the SimCity gameplay conventions in interesting ways--partly due to the fact that some of the ideas from the cancelled SimsVille game made their way into SimCity 4.
Just as SimCity was the reason for Maxis' early success and the inspiration for a number of "Sim" games, the massive popularity of The Sims means it's now the newer franchise's turn to influence its older sibling. SimsVille was intended as an intermediate step between The Sims and SimCity, where the player manages whole neighborhoods of sims and tries to satisfy their personal desires and needs. When SimsVille was cancelled in late 2001, it seemed partly due to the fact that the Hot Date expansion for The Sims was just about to come out and add an element of downtown construction to the virtual-life game. Behind the scenes, a large portion of the SimsVille team went to work on SimCity 4. There are number of specific ideas that directly carried over from SimsVille to SimCity 4, mainly in terms of how to randomize the visuals and give character to the neighborhoods when viewed up close. It's also easy to see that the user interface has taken on the familiar rounded look of The Sims interface, with most critical information centered in the lower left part of the screen. And, while the feature isn't as fleshed out as it was intended to be in SimsVille, SimCity 4 does have sims, complete with basic personalities.
SimCity 4 is nonetheless very true to the series' core gameplay, and it makes many improvements on the earlier games. The most fundamental has to do with making cities a part of a region, with up to 64 cities per region. When each city stood by itself, the constraint of having to provide the same services in an optimal way within a set space meant that cities often started to resemble each other. But now that cities work together more organically, it's possible to build a variety of city types, with some dedicated to heavy industry and power production, some to dense downtown commercial and residential development, and others to suburban bedroom communities.
While this may sound complicated, it's not. We recently had a chance to play the game, and if anything, SimCity 4 seems to be easier to get into than its predecessors. For example, it's very easy to connect cities in a region and figure out how cities are working together. In a fresh new region, you'll start off with the option to terraform any of the city areas in the god mode, then you'll likely start building up one city in the mayor mode. Once that city is humming along, start on one or two more nearby and zone these cities to specialize them in an area your main city is lacking, such as industry or residential population. As soon as you build roads to the corresponding edges to the map, the demand and supply bars for all the cities will equalize and play off each other. There's a region map where you can see what each city is contributing to the whole, and you don't have to worry about strikes or budget problems in one city while managing another, since cities are in stasis when you're not dealing with them. However, you've set up a city to have 10,000 manufacturing jobs and built other cities to rely on that, then it won't be long before you'll fill up those job openings and need to go back and create more jobs.
The interface also helps you get cities up and running quickly by automating a lot of minor tasks. It's easy to draw a big zoning area and let the game fill in roads in an appropriate way. Or you can click and hold the mouse button and it will show you one way of filling in an area around the cursor. Using the automation won't result in as pretty a city, but it is fast, and it sometimes does away with painful micromanagement. When you put in a highway system, you no longer need to manually install on and off ramps, though there are some nice cloverleaf upgrades you may want to put in later. And gone is the need for intricate placement of water mains, which now serve a large area to allow for the development of upscale housing.
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- GameSpot Score8.1great
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SimCity 4 Review
Though not as polished as it could have been, SimCity 4 is still a complex and detailed strategy game that can entertain you for hours on end.
- Jan 15, 2003
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