SimCity FAIL - You are Fired.

User Rating: 1.5 | SimCity PC
Well I've had the game now for a while, despite the gawd awful long wait it took to get the download to work, and the utter failure of EA support to help me out. I ended up having to buy a second license and then dispute the first purchase. After days and days the download finally completed and I spent the next six days waiting, 20 minutes at a pop, to get onto a server. Finally I get on one and CRASH. This time it only took me about six hours to get back on to a server. I played around with the game, doing up the tutorial to a point, where it stopped working, and well that is about as far as I was able to get for that session. It took me another two days of waiting to get back on only to find out that all of my progress in my first game was null and void. Great. Started over. Played for about two hours this time before being kicked by the server for some reason or another. In that time I was linked up with a couple of other players, both didn't want to play with any one so it was a challenge to say the least with crime, and pollution.

It took another few days before I was able to log back on and once again all my progress was gone. At this point I just beat my head against the key board and started over.

The game looks good albeit the graphic quality seemed a bit fuzzy to mean and I was having a hard time reading some of the fonts. My EVGA 680 is more than enough to run the game but evidently there is no way to improve the quality of the game.

As to connection issues, well good luck getting on if you can. Over the last few days things have been easier since fewer are playing, obviously having gotten fed up with the log in issues, and game progress seems to be stable more so than not. No unexpected issues as far as game progress not being saved since the last incident.

The GUI is very intuitive IMHO but a bit lack luster in its over all function and design. It is quite usable but in a general sense of the word "Universal" and dumbed down.

The sound effects are welcome and well timed. There were a few sound artifacts that repeated occasionally that did wear a bit on me over longer game plays but all in all I am pleased by the over all sound system of the game.

Pros - Can be a lot of fun.
Cons - Connection issues, fuzzy graphics, bugs, small game area, (Very frustrating when compared to older versions of the game.) Frustrating lag issues, games not always being properly saved or synced. Cooperative play is far from cooperative. Connection issues, the way they handle connection issues. EA customer support is ABYSMAL.

I can go on but you'll get the wrong idea. I love SimCity, I just don't love THIS SimCity. The bugs, the connection issues, the over all failed features, and the online ONLY play just sabotage this game beyond salvage IMHO. Do yourself a favor and go buy SimCity 4 Rush Hour. You'll have a lot more fun with that obsolete game than you'll ever have with this one.