Sim City has become a fun addition to the sim series, but recently it has become something we might like to forget.
Everyone familiar with the series of sim city is aware that each time you sit down, it's still hard. No matter how long you've played, you still ahve to manage a big city and lots of people at once. One wrong move could crash the place, so it always kept you on your toes. In this rendition of sim city, this challenging aspect has been removed. Why? Who knows? Maybe the developers decided that their games were too hard and thought about making them easier? Maybe they thought it would be more kid-friendly? Whatever they thought, it was a wrong move. This game is just too simple. As long as you keep things balanced, and by things I mean the social energies, everyone, or most of your sims anyways, will maintain their happiness and won't bug you. They no longer demand a police station, in fact, it can sometimes not even be needed! Occasionally crime will be nonexistent in your society. They also don't demand much in terms of health or education. This makes it much easier to plan things out and make more money, because you're not spending it on civil services as much as you used to. Frankly, making the game so easy to operate and so easy to manage has taken out all the fun that the old version would bring. I relished the challenge of sitting down and improving my city day-to-day and finding out what needed to be fixed. With this installment int he series, this challenge is taken out, and you can practically sit and play with your eyes closed. You can do virtually anything, as long as you keep it in moderation, and your city will flourish. I dislike this quality, as it takes out over half of the entertainment value out of the game. I was bored after playing this game for a mere 8 and a half hours, compared to the other versions where I got bored around the 30 hour mark. Lack in challenge just makes it a drag.
Now, onto the graphics problems. Sure, the 3D effects are nice, it has great detail, and even the smaller things have shadows built in, but once your city gets big, this changes quite a bit. Why? Frame rate. After your city gets big, things start to run all at once and speed slows down because of it. This lowers the graphics performance drastically. Sims stop and stutter while walking, motions look like a slide show, and zooming and scrolling is sketchy and awkward. It can take several second to zoom in one level, and it can take you a couple minutes to pan where you want, since it does it in sharp jolts and turns, so it isn't easy to get it right. At first when I saw the graphics I thought "Wow, these are pretty good, since it's a big game and all that." . But then once my city got bigger, which didn't take me more than half an hour, things got very, very, slow. This was one of the things that made it so boring. I just didn't want to deal with slow graphics and frame issues while I was trying to have at least a little fun. While the 3D was nice, it could have used some fixing.
Oh, and I almost forgot: the glitches. My computer crashed a couple of times while I was playing my game, and me being me, I don't save until just before I turn it off. So naturally, I lose all my progress, and I have to go back and do it all again in a slow environment, thanks to frame rate again. Even though it doesn't take long to get back to where you were, you can forget a few things that you did, and heck, it's just plain frustrating when your game crashes and you lose data. Thank heavens for the patch that allowed me to play my game without crashing... at least for a while. Soon my city got so big that the game crashed anyways, and it does every time I try to load it. So that's it, my city can no longer be played because I put so much in it. Now that was frustrating, if nothing else. So much for a patch, eh?
Now, about the short run gameplay.... We all know that gameplay is the most important attribute of a game, right? Right. But this game has none, right? Right. Seriously, sim city societies has failed us dearly in terms of gameplay value. I don't know what went into the developer's minds when they thought that making this game easier would do anything for the better, but hey, if that's how they like it, then fine. They made one heck of a bad game because of that decision. I mean, heck, if the game difficulty had been left alone and the unrelated social energies been left out, then this game might actually have been bearable, even with frame rate and crashing problems. I'm not kidding when I say that this was by far the worst installment of the sim city series since Sim City SNES.
Overall the poor quality of graphics, mixed with the glitches and the undeniably easy difficulty helped to make a good idea go horrible wrong. When I heard the title of the game I was intrigued, but now I lay confounded at how they could let something that had such potential go so wrong. It dismayed me greatly to see a sim city game go down the quality drain for the first time since the 90s. I look forward to the day when they stick to the old formula. Until then, sorry EA, but you really sucked this time around.