Hours soon fly by
User Rating: 8.5 | SimCity 4 PC
Sim City is a management simulation where you take the role as major to run a city. You zone residential, commercial and industrial buildings, and strategically place buildings such as police/fire stations, schools, hospitals, and recreational buildings to bring the best out of your city, whilst maintaining a power and water supply to keep it all running. Obviously, this poses a challenge and a lot of perseverance, time and learning needs to go into it to run a thriving city. This time, the game has taken the neighbourhood interface of The Sims. There are many maps and many squared areas on the map which you can place your city in. Nearby cities can do business deals such as supplying power or water, or dealing with their waste. Sims can also commute from one city to another. You will be constantly be presented with problems, because when you zone more residential areas you will need to try and include them in the coverage of police stations, schools and hospitals and make sure they are supplied with power and water. Additionally, you need to be constantly thinking about transport, not just making sure sims have access to work, but to make sure they get there quickly. This may mean more expensive roads like avenues (dual carriageways) and motorways, or other transport options like monorail, bus stops, or trains. When you want to place more residential, it will require placing roads, as well as zoning commercial and industrial areas to provide jobs, but then you need to make sure there is a sufficient water and power supply. Spacing out your city helps in the future because its easy to upgrade roads to avenues or highways, but spreading them out increased the need for hospitals/schools etc because they only supply an area around them, and power lines may be needed to join the disparate sections of your town. Earlier on, there is a high demand for industry, but this increases pollution which lowers land value. This is usually okay to attract the low wealth residents, but high wealth sims won't move there, so within your city you may have specialist areas. There's plenty of things to think about and a lot of experimenting to do without much help from the game. Sim City is one of those games where time flies by, and minutes soon turn to hours. There's no end to the game; so you just keep playing, or starting new cities until you want a new challenge, or bring your city to bankruptcy.
