I don't disagree with Gamespot.
User Rating: 6 | SimCity Societies PC
All flash, that's it. Nothing else. Nada. I just sat at the computer placing this building here, the other one there, watched people move, the end. Wait one moment... I thought it was a city builder, not an urban dollhouse. It was more like building blocks then manage your own city. Where's the fiscal budget, the property taxes, the protesters, the *Actual* pollution that has an effect on the city and not just added for asthetics, the bustling non-linear highways that are conjested at 5:00 p.m., the city officials trying to tell you that pavement doesn't breathe and that we need more trees, et cetera? What disturbed me the most was the lack of growth. All you do is place buildings in one spot and then watch the nothingness teem from the vacuity of pointless action. In real cities there's development and consequences for the actions taken by officials. In Sim City: Societies, reality seems to have perished and Tilted Mill substituted there own. You can't blame them for trying their earnest at an inherently-Maxis production and falling short, but at least it wasn't completely disastrous. The graphics were nice and the whole game had a jovial, cartoonish humour to it. But I couldn't help but overlook these qualities to lament the boxy textures and insipid gameplay. The fact is that this game could have been really good if it were to have just worked out. And sadly, sometimes things just don't work out. Maybe it was a bad concept or bad planning. And, of course, one has to remember that this is not SimCity 5, because if that was so, then they wouldn't have named it SimCity: Societies. But with such a behmoth to live up to, it is hard not to reflect on other SimCity games. I really hoped it would transcend all of the bad hype. It didn't. That's not to say because it was some SimCity phony, but because it just didn't work.
