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And considering what a pain it is to maintain multiple cities yourself that’s another big fat burning hole of a problem.Īnd again what’s most frustrating here is that there’s a clearly great game underneath the dictatorial exterior. If the other 15 people in your area are incompetent or anti-social then your city is doomed before it’s even begun. The very obvious problem with this, other than it seeming an entirely artificial limitation, is that relying on the goodwill of other online players is exactly as terrible an idea as it sounds. Since there’s not enough space to build everything you want in your city you’re encourage to strike deals for power, resources, emergency services, and utilities.Īt a basic level the game is still about zoning residential, commercial, and industrial buildings but because you can’t create the right balance on your own you have to build according to the specialisations of others around you. If you do you’ll find yourself in your own little interconnected region with up to 16 other people. You can play entirely on your own and create multiple cities on different maps (although you’ll still need an always-on Internet connection) but what the game really wants you to do is co-operate with other people. Not only is the building area restricted because of the online restrictions (most of your data and even some of the processing calculations are done on EA’s servers) but because the game wants you to collaborate with other players in other cities. We don’t mean that flippantly either as the game clearly knows what it’s doing. It may not look that way at first but compared to the open canvas you had in the earlier games here you’re being purposefully restricted in what you can build. It may seem like a trivial detail but it immediately makes the game seem accessible and friendly.Įven when you start to delve deeper, to look at the stats that measure your city, everything is presented in an instantly understandable and genuinely useful fashion.Īt this point visions of your dream city are likely to start flitting through your mind, but as soon as you start to build it you hit the game’s most serious flaw: the area you have to build your city on is tiny. The way buildings and objects click into place as you move them about is hugely satisfying, like the video game equivalent of fixing a Lego brick in place.
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Not only that but the interface is excellent. There are a lot of very complicated things going on under the hood in SimCity but the game manages to keep it all very well hidden. Part of the appeal was in being able to create complex systems using very simple tools, and that has certainly been carried through to the reboot. After all, there aren’t many other strategy games that were just as big a hit on the SNES as they were the PC. That may sound impossibly boring but the game’s long legacy is proof enough of its strange addictive powers.