A flawed, fun and addictive game, Sim City epitomizes the immersive experience.
Sim City is flawed. The elephant in the room has been its understandable but heavily flawed always online DRM. Certain things break, saving doesn't always work right, there is quite an extensive list. However, this doesn't stop Sim City from being an enjoyable and challenging strategic city builder.
This is one game where it's obvious Maxis wants you to learn most things on your own. Notices of new buildings "available" pop up and guiding yourself through the menus and trying to figure out what is where is part of the fun. A brief tutorial gives you a lesson in the basics, but they leave the rest up to you.
The game also oozes charm. The smile inducing language of The Sims return as does their currency. The animation is a good mix of real world mechanics and tongue in cheek cartoonish animations. You see buildings in residential, commercial and industrial zones be gradually built while placed buildings land with a satisfying and smile inducing crunch. The music is very calming, making it very hard to gamer-rage when you realize you messed something up.
Sometimes things do mess up on their own. Traffic jams up in certain areas for no apparent reason, sometimes you can't update a certain building or you can't tell how much water/ power/ sewage your city is processing. It often requires exiting out to the main menu to temporarily fix the issue, but hopefully this is something that will be fixed for good. There's also the police criminal chases that remind me of watching something out of Benny Hill as the police icons go in a totally separate direction from the criminal icons.
This hasn't stopped me from putting roughly 70 hours into the game. Abandoning a region and starting another one is easy and runs smoothly. Choosing a region and which city to claim in a region is all part of the strategy. Finite space in each city means more space management than in past games is required. This also plays into the point of the region and the inclusion of multi player into the series.
I haven't experienced multi player, but have had fun building my own private regions and seeing how well (they do alright) the cities communicate. You can send money from a rich city to an up and coming city, send them power, water, sewage use, etc. Overall the simulation Maxis has set up is impressive.
Sim City is somewhat of a wallflower game. There are a lot of reasons to be turned off by all of the flaws, but the deep simulation and city building aspects make this a sexy ass game for me. Warts and all, Sim City is a triumph in my eyes and epitomizes the immersive experience.