CITY LIFE IS NOT SIMCITY - AND SHOULD BE RATED ACCORDINGLY
City Life IS NOT a SimCity clone! Most of the negative reviews seem to be coming from SC4 officianados and that is just not fair comparison to a game that in no way tries to resemble the HO modeling of SimCity.
City Life, though a city building game, is not of the same ilk as SimCity. City Life uses a city building theme that is more people oriented than SimCity's modeling oriented goals. In SimCity you can have a thriving city of millions of people who have no needs except work and the shortest route to get to work, yet they do not seem to care about eating (you don't have to have a restaurant or store anywhere in a large metropolis to please the Sims), but in City Life the people eat and have personal needs that must be met, more so than in SimCity.
I would best score City Life's opening offering with an 8.0 and quite a bit of potential for extreme growth in coming evolutions. It would be nice to see more of the stats and needs of SimCity included, which should be easy enough to do for the developers, but let's get the version 1.0 to market first.
People are already starting to create personal buildings, like in SC4 and if the developers focus more on even more NEEDS of the people, like HOME IMPROVEMENT CENTERS, GAS STATIONS, ELECTRONICS STORES - CONSUMER STUFF for their City Lifers, watch out SimCity, but to compare City Life to Simcity is a mistake, and if you play City Life as if it were Simcity, you'll be in for a rude, bankrupted awakening!