With a few tweaks here and there, City Life could have been a much better title.
City Life is a "city sim" that follows the guidelines of SimCity. Urban planning is crucial, but the innovation is the social component that makes that planning even more challenging. While the game involves addressing the same problems we are familiar with as Mayors (traffic, industry, commerce, budget, residences, crime) there is a social hierarchy that you must pay attention to while planning and building.
There are six social classes: Have-Not, Fringe, Blue Collar, Suit, Radical Chic and Elite (in this order, from low to high). Each of the classes has a certain group they feel comfortable living with and other groups that they totally dislike and can't stand being around of. For example, Elites can't get along with Have-Nots, neither can Suits with Fringes.
So now in addition to providing residential and commercial zones you have a new strategic component: to take into account the social aspect of the game, managing which classes live in certain neighborhoods. Mix them up randomly and you will end up with a bunch of unhappy citizens organizing riots.
However, you can't really pick where your citizens will live, but there are certain buildings and facilities that attract a specific social class (i.e. industries will have a series of Have-Nots looking for a job, while Fringes will come to hang out at underground bars).
The ultimate goal is to make sure all these classes are happy coexisting with one another. But eventually, balancing it all out becomes a problem, as the city and its respective population grow. Take grocery stores, for example. Everyone in each social class makes use of grocery stores, but only Fringers can get a job in them… sooner or later you will end up with a social conflict.
The buildings are interesting to see, since each of them seems to "fit in" with the community and social class it belongs to. Buildings in a Fringe area will have graffiti art on the walls, while a Blue Collar residential zone will sport swimming pools and pick-up trucks on the driveways.
Your City Hall changes in size and appearance with prestige. The more impressive it becomes and the more citizens you get, the more structures you will be able to access later. Think of it as unlockables, and they range from skyscrapers to marinas and all sorts of useful facilities (hospitals, airports, schools, movie theatres, even a games studio).
To enjoy your city from a different perspective, you can go into first-person mode and parade around watching everything through a citizen's eyes. This is actually a good way to spot protesters or traffic jams, find a good location for a certain service, even watch little "gang fights" between different class members. You also get to see that your citizens happen to be clones of each other and everyone from the same social class wears the same clothing. Unfortunately, the camera options are limited and you can't look up or down. This type of game usually sports tons of data: migration, demographics, tax revenue... City Life is no exception, but the data could have been presented in a better way. A tutorial other than a slideshow would probably have been better to make players who are new to the genre accustomed with things. However, the game does give you little hints during gameplay.
Overall, this is an engrossing game with tons of options (maybe too many), offering a different take on city building. With a few tweaks here and there, City Life could have been a much better title.
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