SimCity

Everyone starts playing SimCity like they might do The Sims - with malevolence in mind. They think they will create a city full of pollution, full of crime, full of pain - they think they'll make the worst city ever. I know I thought this initially, but it all went out the window the moment my first sims moved in.

This is because SimCity: the reboot is a game about Social Engineering, not Civil Engineering - - so straight up it might be a disappointment to some people. For those not familiar with earlier games in the series, building a city first meant making sure the terrain was to your specifications - be it flat, hilly, filled with water or whatever. Then you'd lay critical infrastructure like roads and power and water, create some residential, commercial and industrial (RCI) zones and then boom - you're in the Mayorin' business.

The new SimCity isn't like that. Instead it's all tied to the roads. Terraforming is done for you when you cut roads through mountains or across rivers. Power and Water infrastructure follows road networks (as does sewerage) too, so in this SimCity what you need to do is plop (that's the term the game uses) down some roads, a power station, a water tower and paint on some RCI zones and boom - you're in the Mayorin' business.

And then things get crazy.

Social Engineering is about shaping your city through economic and social influences. If you want your Residential areas to be high income, place them away from your power plant, your industrial areas, your sewerage treatment facility, your garbage dump. You'll put it near a school, or commercial zones, or a beach. If you want to bump up a medium wealth residential area on the sly you'll throw in some beautiful parks, give them some bus stops or other public transport systems and make sure they have access to health care.

Schools are important, because the higher overall education level of your city the less crime there will be. At the same time though, the more educated your citizens become the more likely they are to care about things like the environment and the rehabilitation of criminals.

Eventually you realise you actively want to keep your citizens a little bit stupid to save buying an expensive and ultimately underwhelming Recycling Centre. Not even supervillains like Dr Doom deliberately make their citizens stupider.

This might all seem simple in writing, but as a player it takes time to get a grip on a lot of the smaller things. Things like the size of your city blocks - initially you might be inclined to make them small, because smaller blocks means less wasted space in the middle. As you go through the game it will become obvious that you need that space in the middle for your houses to become apartment blocks and high rises - you'll never get your New York City skyline without adequate space for the buildings.

Or you might try to cut down on pollution by getting rid of all your Industrial zones - not realising that with an educated enough populace your city will naturally evolve into low-emission high-tech computer industry.



Superficially these things make SimCity seem like a puzzle-solving game - but it's really a deep management sim occasionally akin to spinning plates on sticks. When you're managing your finite source of water, your ever growing energy needs, an epic homeless problem and a city-wide epidemic of broken arms - all while trying to implement the next phase in your city's growth (casinos) - it can be tough to deal with. Luckily your mayoral advisor is constantly available to tell you if there's one thing in particular your city can't stand - and if you stay ever vigilant while sweeping around your city your citizens themselves should tell you too.

The thing is, it can't last forever. It won't last forever. Water really does appear to be a finite resource, and eventually you'll need to get it from somewhere else. So instead, you're going to need another city - one with enough water for itself and you. And hell, while you're there maybe they could drill for oil and ore to get some of those resources your industry so badly needs. Maybe they could house some of those low-wealth workers, and you could have them commute via train each day! Maybe they could have no commercial properties at all, forcing them to buy stuff from your main town.

Suddenly, three thoughts come to mind. The first - aren't both cities your explicit responsibility, and so do you really have a 'main' town anymore? The second - are you deliberately creating an over-polluted waste area where people will have to live? And lastly - should you maybe start from scratch, so you can build both of these cities properly?

When you realise just how many cities you should have going at once to maximise your efficiency, you also realise that multiplayer isn't just some half-thought out idea shoe-horned into the game to justify the Always-Online requirement of the game. Playing an entire region on your own is damn tiring - and playing with mates is just more fun. Especially when you read over the newswire that their city has zombies attacking moments after they asked you for some cash to stave off impending bankruptcy.

That said, when you load up the game and you're greeted with a notice telling you you're not connected to the SimCity servers, or you get told while playing that you've been disconnected - that's a crappy experience. The game's got some killer bugs too - I was lucky enough to skip the tutorial the first time I started up, but it still asks me to complete it occasionally (and then doesn't let me complete it). That and the servers get overwhelmed occasionally, rendering me unable to claim a new city. These things should go away eventually - and they can be fixed pretty easily - but they still exist.

The eight regions you get with the game seem restrictive, even if you are technically capable of making at least 76 cities - probably because your city conforms to the environment and you can't change this. Earlier I extolled the game's ability to force the player to commit to social - not civil - engineering, but to be honest I don't want to build a city on a series of three islands just for 'the challenge'. I'm sure perching half of your town atop a gorgeous plateau is great for property values but it'd be much more efficient if I was building on a flat piece of land. When playing Civilization I don't settle cities in the middle of a desert for kicks, so why would I deliberately hamstring myself in SimCity?

SimCity has some launch issues, and while I wholeheartedly believe that - thanks to the complex nature of city management and the global resources market - Always-Online is a necessity, I also believe this was a problem Maxis created for themselves by engineering the game this way. Lucky for them, the game has depth and oodles of replayability.

SimCity made me connect with the Sims in my world more than any Sims game ever could - and then it made me wilfully hurt them to further my own agenda. It simultaneously made me uncomfortable with my actions and impelled to win at the same time. That's an odd feeling to get out of a game where you can deliberately unleash a giant fire breathing lizard on an unsuspecting populace.