While a full orchestrated soundtrack doesn’t come and smack you on the face this time, you’ll still find that SimCity still has tunes that run during gameplay. Graphs and charts that measure population and resource consumption are laid out in tall, easy to understand bars that sprout from every single building enough to satisfy the data geek in you.
There’s also the magnificent new way data is visualized throughout your city. The best metaphor to describe the roads you lay down are like the circulatory system in the body as it circulates the water supply and removes the waste with an enchanting heartbeat, helping to emphasise the point that your city is a living, breathing organism. Roads are of the upmost importance in SimCity, playing a more essential role in providing real estate for residential, commercial and industrial (RCI) zoning as well as the connection to power, water and the removal of raw sewage. The connection of your first road to the regional highway beyond your borders.
More on that later.Įvery city starts off the same way. Some of us will miss the ability to craft your own plot of land with fanciful mountains and valleys, but there are reasons for restricting all that. All the city plots are connected by road, and perhaps rail and the chance for future inter-city connections by ferry off the shoreline. There is no God mode, and meticulous terraforming is a thing of the past. Unlike SimCity 4, all regions are pre-made, each with several plots of similarly-sized land to kick off cities from. But before you get to that, there is a little bit of work you must do. A well-developed, densely-populated city will have pretty skyscrapers sprawling from the ground below, with its population alive with activity on street-level. It is the first title ever to have a city in full three-dimensional 360-degree rotatable graphics, and what comes out from what you zone in your city is a sight to behold. It still lies on the same foundations as all the previous games but it also shows the good and the bad of what ten years can bring. It’s been ten years since Maxis gave us the previous title in the SimCity series, but while SimCity 4 and its predecessors will have a place in my heart, it’s time to move on.ĥimCity SimCity is the fifth numbered title in the popular city-planning and city-management franchise.