GoldenRivet
05-01-13, 05:41 AM
A good friend of mine recently purchased a copy of Sim City 5 and presented it to me for my birthday so after a few days of play time, i have decided to write my own little review of the game.
When i was a kid playing my super nintnendo i have many fond memories of staying up intil the wee hours of the morning simulating my little city. and despite the unmoving graphics and the repetitive sounds and music i rather enjoyed playing the game for reasons i cant put my finger on.
in the end however, i would always find myself with a mixed bag of completely unsolvable problems. Horrible traffic, choking air pollution, unruly sims angry about crime or land values. and no matter what you did, these problems never really went away. sometimes one or two issues would improve, sometimes they would all get disasterously worse, but every version of sim city has presented the player with this mixed bag and every version has lead the player to one final conclusion...
Utopia is an impossible dream, socioeconomic problems are an unsolvable human element common to every society, and you - the arm chair mayor - will never be able to solve the issues of the game...this ultimately left you with only a couple of choices, among them...
continue playing, attempting to answer an unanswerable riddle of a game for eternity
or unleash any number of disasters thereby completely wrecking everything you have just created and basking in the glow of the ensuing fires.
Sim City 5 looks good, it is easy to get into and has a shallow learning curve, the game is more or less intended to be a multiplayer game leaving the single player component more for practice than for serious play. Though playing alone is completely possible and even enjoyable, one doesnt have to play long to see why multiplayer is important.
Sim City 5 also accomplishes the same goal that every single previous version of the game has set out to accomplish... leaving you frustrated at 3am bewildered by the unmerciful bumper to bumper traffic, ears ringing with the unending sound of police and fire engine sirens, trying to focus over the chanting of protestors in front of city hall angry about the water quality and marveling at the 5 alarm fire as it completely consumes a large electronics factory you've spent hours acquiring. trust me... the defeat you feel as you order the burned down hulk of its remains bulldozed is palpable.
you have probably heard the term "Burden of leadership"... its a true statement, and sim city is digital proof of concept where that idea is concerned.
new to sim city is the idea that you have limited resources such as ore, coal, water, manpower, machines etc and that these resources must be shared and traded with other communities throughout your "region"
sim city has a number of regions which several players can each join, within each region - like a country - there are several cities, each geographical cityscape offering their own unique advantages and disadvantages.
a mountainous cityscape for example might be rich in ore or coal, but the rugged terrain and the arid climate mean there is little room for building a sprawling metropolis and little or no water sources to be found.
a player in this situation might specialize his city in mining and refining ore so that the ore can be sold on the regional market, choosing to purchase other resources like water from a neighboring community, and to save the room of building a power plant, the player might instead opt to purchase power as well.
a locale with sprawling beaches, and lots of building space on the other hand might influence the player to focus on tourism, he would be wise to avoid the heavy industry that pollutes and soils his city instead opting to import items he needs
another player could focus on oil refining and producing plastics essential to other industries such as electronics fabrication...
in the region, it becomes clear that in order to keep your city functioning, virtually all of these resources will be needed, unfortunately the resources are spread out all over the region, and it will be up to you and the other players to make use of them properly.
While one player refines oil and produces plastics in one city, another player is mining for and smelting ore and producing alloys... another player in another city makes things profitable by building microprocessors, TVs and home electronics for export, another player relies solely on tourism to boost the economy. Each one of these players will have to work together to ensure that their individual needs are met because they will all need something from one another.
While this sounds like a complicated process, the game engine makes it fairly automated once you simply tell the game whether you wish to use your commodity locally or trade it with another city you basically then would just pick which city you share it with and the rest takes place behind the scenes.
but when playing sim city in the past, we really only deal with one limited resource... cash.
One problem i always had with the sim city series was my budget, in previous versions you would suffer a specific amount of exopense for x amount of police stations or fire stations etc, while that is still the case, there are now more realistic economic factors taken into consideration.
the city now has additional sources of income. The flat rate non adjustable taxes on the electronics sold by the electronics factory for example... they dont show up on your budget sheet - but its a nice $200,000 surprise every sim-month. Start building TVs and home electronics, the income increases by a similar amount. (casinos, oil money etc also offer similar financial perks) The power you provide to another city is worth x amount of dollars (simoleons) per kilowatt, the coal or oil you export (assuming you have the recourses and have mined them) all add to your city budget.
it is not until your city starts to become a sprawling metropolis that budget issues start to require a lot more planning. But i was surprised to consistently see my city "in the black" even though it was my first day at the mayoral helm.
as your city becomes more industrialized for example, a basic fire station works great for house fires and fires at small businesses but, you will need a large fire station with a "hazmat team" in order to effectively fight a massive factory fire - the regular fire departments will try valiantly to suppress the factory fire but ultimately an industrial explosion will demolish the plant, and cause nearby structures to catch fire. despite its advantages, the larger fire and police departments take a notably larger bite out of your city budget.
prior versions of the game allowed you to receive a loan, but this was often times just prolonging the inevitable bankruptcy. In Sim City 5, you have Bonds which can be paid off early, and actually serve the purpose of allowing you cash on hand now so that you can take care of specific needs that will make your city more profitable later... often times you are well on the road to profitability long before the bond is half or more paid off.
other than trading resources in multiplayer there are also the "great works". specific parts of the region will be reserved for these "works", which are items like a massive solar power grid array the size of a city, or the construction of a major international airport. the construction of these items require massive amounts of resources. a sprawled out international airport might require a great deal of alloys, and electronics and refined ore, not to mention the immense price tag for example... a single city might be able to provide enough resources to get the job done in single player mode on a long enough time line... but it is far more likely that such an undertaking would either bankrupt the single playing loner, or exhaust him of a precious resource long before the project was completed, but the idea is that each city from the region will contribute to a mutually beneficial project like an international airport.
once the airport is completed, trade dramatically would increase, exports and imports would climb ever higher, tourists would pour in to visit your buffet of casinos. of course you still have the option of including a small airport within the confines if your city, however it takes up space, and depending on what your cities "specialty" is, a local airport might not be necessary or even productive enough to justify the use of precious space.
the single player is not at a total disadvantage, a single player can serve as mayor on multiple cities simultaneously within a "private region" which other players cannot participate in. A single player can develop and control multiple cities at once, but this can be a headache.
one problem with sim city 5 - whether intentional or not - is the lack of space in which to build your city. Unlike cities XL for example, the player is limited to a rather small box shaped border in which the city must remain and the player cannot build anything beyond this border. the unfortunate side effect is that building space... much like coal, water and oil, becomes a precious commodity that you WILL ultimately run out of. by the time you have 80,000 to 100,000 people living in your city there is hardly a square inch of real estate which is not occupied. so, when another recycling center, or an extension of your powerplant, or another fire department is warranted you have to start being very careful about what you chose to tear down to make room for the essential new building.
there is a "great work" called "Arcology" which the players can choose to team up and build somewhere on the region map - once built it serves as a massive "green ecosystem living space" for the sims living in your region... the concept is that once it is completed, most (perhaps all)of your sims will choose to live within this arcology community freeing up room within the confines of your box for you to expand factories, casinos, office buildings etc - the sims would then commute by any number of means into your city to work and play but would keep residence within the arcology complex.
its an interesting concept in the evolution of the sims within the sim city franchise. perhaps a utopia of sorts is possible with the arcology construction which would free the player to focus strictly on specific city functions and building types. (obviously i have not completed the "great works" of arcology yet) I can envision a city free of traffic, without the precious space consumed by sprawling neighborhoods, space which can be used for office buildings, businesses, tourist attractions, factories. A city in which garbage disposal and the health impacts of pollution are a thing of the past. you name it... but until i manage to accomplish this, it is all assumption on how arcology will work.
for now however i will have to deal with the minor annoyances: like a business closing down because they are worried about crime, despite the fact that one neighbor is a business with booming profits and the other neighbor is - - the police station! or the various houses being abandoned with little explanation other than "not enough money" or the factory that closes down with the simple explanation "no skilled workers" despite the fact that you have numerous elementary schools, high schools, a community college and a major university in your city that should be cranking out a suit and tie wearing army of skilled workers.
of course if all does not go to plan, and these little annoyances rub you the wrong way you still have the ability to strike down on your subjects with a giant lizzard, or tornado or earthquake etc
In multiplayer mode however, these disasters occur at random and the player only has control of the disasters after unlocking certain achievements, and for such an accurate and authentic city simulation i was surprised to see the giant lizard included as a disaster you might possibly face in the game. Obviously the lizard was a throwback to the old original SimCity games, so in that way it is pretty neat i guess, but it detracts from the realism of the simulation when you are faced with a lizard attack... but that is the least of the disastrous problems in keeping with the modern zombie fascination the kids these days seem to have, your city can experience an actual zombie apocalypse as one of the disasters.
you read that right, and it is perhaps the most crippling disaster the game has to offer, a disaster which unfortunately one of my better cities experienced first hand. zombies roamed the streets, dozens of buildings lie dormant and obviously damaged and abandoned with the pop up description when moused over "Consumed by zombies", the sounds of gun shots rang out in the streets, sirens waled constantly as police and firefighters appeared overwhelmed. In the end my economy was almost completely ruined, and at least 40-50% of the buildings in my city had to be demolished and rebuilt... not to mention the reduction in population. I wager that if left unattended for a period of time for a shower or a smoke break for example... if a zombie apocalypse within SimCity 5 were to occur during the absence it could almost completely destroy a city before you ever knew what happened.
and this is another place where multiplayer shines. Following a major disaster like an earthquake for example, neighboring cities can assist with medical and emergency services, just as they would in real life... Thats right, one mayer can offer a number of police, fire and ambulance units to another city temporarily after that city has experienced a disaster. additionally, if one player is just establishing his city, and has not yet budgeted for a police force, a neighboring player can send police units to help control crime (or fire units to fight fires etc) until the new player is on his feet.
i have always asked of the sim city series "whats the end game?" - im not accustomed to playing a game which appears to have no end. modern video games are like books or movies, there is a clear beginning, a story, a climactic crescendo and a conclusion. Sim city - much like pong - would theoretically go on forever (assuming you had the digital dollars with which to keep managing your city as going broke is the only way to lose) it is the never ending story of video games.
im still scratching my head as to the "point" of playing the game... it seems to have no conclusion, there is no end, and the only goal is to build an ever larger city. But with sim city 5 and the arcology concept - the goal very well could be to migrate your city into this new "green community" type of futuristic existence... but once you do that - still you could likely continue to play... forever if you could live that long.
so whats the verdict?
In my opinion this is probably the best version of sim city yet created - despite the teething issues with the servers experienced early in the release ( i have experienced no problems as of the time of this writing)
It sticks closely enough to its classic roots to be familiar if not charming, yet it offers so many new concepts and so many new ways to play that it is set uniquely apart from its predecessors.
If you are a fan of the sim city series... Sim City 5 wont disappoint.
If you just kinda like to build a big city and then smash it with disasters... the single player component wont disappoint either! the fires, the booms and the various disaster effects are satisfying. tall buildings will even do a vertical fall when you use the bull dozer on them, appearing as if they had been taken down by demolition charges.
i would say the game is a solid 7.5 out of 10
the only thing preventing a higher score is lack of replayability... i know in the end before long i will have shelved this title just like the rest of the sim city games i have played, simply succumbing to indifference after dedicating many hours to virtual city planning.
When i was a kid playing my super nintnendo i have many fond memories of staying up intil the wee hours of the morning simulating my little city. and despite the unmoving graphics and the repetitive sounds and music i rather enjoyed playing the game for reasons i cant put my finger on.
in the end however, i would always find myself with a mixed bag of completely unsolvable problems. Horrible traffic, choking air pollution, unruly sims angry about crime or land values. and no matter what you did, these problems never really went away. sometimes one or two issues would improve, sometimes they would all get disasterously worse, but every version of sim city has presented the player with this mixed bag and every version has lead the player to one final conclusion...
Utopia is an impossible dream, socioeconomic problems are an unsolvable human element common to every society, and you - the arm chair mayor - will never be able to solve the issues of the game...this ultimately left you with only a couple of choices, among them...
continue playing, attempting to answer an unanswerable riddle of a game for eternity
or unleash any number of disasters thereby completely wrecking everything you have just created and basking in the glow of the ensuing fires.
Sim City 5 looks good, it is easy to get into and has a shallow learning curve, the game is more or less intended to be a multiplayer game leaving the single player component more for practice than for serious play. Though playing alone is completely possible and even enjoyable, one doesnt have to play long to see why multiplayer is important.
Sim City 5 also accomplishes the same goal that every single previous version of the game has set out to accomplish... leaving you frustrated at 3am bewildered by the unmerciful bumper to bumper traffic, ears ringing with the unending sound of police and fire engine sirens, trying to focus over the chanting of protestors in front of city hall angry about the water quality and marveling at the 5 alarm fire as it completely consumes a large electronics factory you've spent hours acquiring. trust me... the defeat you feel as you order the burned down hulk of its remains bulldozed is palpable.
you have probably heard the term "Burden of leadership"... its a true statement, and sim city is digital proof of concept where that idea is concerned.
new to sim city is the idea that you have limited resources such as ore, coal, water, manpower, machines etc and that these resources must be shared and traded with other communities throughout your "region"
sim city has a number of regions which several players can each join, within each region - like a country - there are several cities, each geographical cityscape offering their own unique advantages and disadvantages.
a mountainous cityscape for example might be rich in ore or coal, but the rugged terrain and the arid climate mean there is little room for building a sprawling metropolis and little or no water sources to be found.
a player in this situation might specialize his city in mining and refining ore so that the ore can be sold on the regional market, choosing to purchase other resources like water from a neighboring community, and to save the room of building a power plant, the player might instead opt to purchase power as well.
a locale with sprawling beaches, and lots of building space on the other hand might influence the player to focus on tourism, he would be wise to avoid the heavy industry that pollutes and soils his city instead opting to import items he needs
another player could focus on oil refining and producing plastics essential to other industries such as electronics fabrication...
in the region, it becomes clear that in order to keep your city functioning, virtually all of these resources will be needed, unfortunately the resources are spread out all over the region, and it will be up to you and the other players to make use of them properly.
While one player refines oil and produces plastics in one city, another player is mining for and smelting ore and producing alloys... another player in another city makes things profitable by building microprocessors, TVs and home electronics for export, another player relies solely on tourism to boost the economy. Each one of these players will have to work together to ensure that their individual needs are met because they will all need something from one another.
While this sounds like a complicated process, the game engine makes it fairly automated once you simply tell the game whether you wish to use your commodity locally or trade it with another city you basically then would just pick which city you share it with and the rest takes place behind the scenes.
but when playing sim city in the past, we really only deal with one limited resource... cash.
One problem i always had with the sim city series was my budget, in previous versions you would suffer a specific amount of exopense for x amount of police stations or fire stations etc, while that is still the case, there are now more realistic economic factors taken into consideration.
the city now has additional sources of income. The flat rate non adjustable taxes on the electronics sold by the electronics factory for example... they dont show up on your budget sheet - but its a nice $200,000 surprise every sim-month. Start building TVs and home electronics, the income increases by a similar amount. (casinos, oil money etc also offer similar financial perks) The power you provide to another city is worth x amount of dollars (simoleons) per kilowatt, the coal or oil you export (assuming you have the recourses and have mined them) all add to your city budget.
it is not until your city starts to become a sprawling metropolis that budget issues start to require a lot more planning. But i was surprised to consistently see my city "in the black" even though it was my first day at the mayoral helm.
as your city becomes more industrialized for example, a basic fire station works great for house fires and fires at small businesses but, you will need a large fire station with a "hazmat team" in order to effectively fight a massive factory fire - the regular fire departments will try valiantly to suppress the factory fire but ultimately an industrial explosion will demolish the plant, and cause nearby structures to catch fire. despite its advantages, the larger fire and police departments take a notably larger bite out of your city budget.
prior versions of the game allowed you to receive a loan, but this was often times just prolonging the inevitable bankruptcy. In Sim City 5, you have Bonds which can be paid off early, and actually serve the purpose of allowing you cash on hand now so that you can take care of specific needs that will make your city more profitable later... often times you are well on the road to profitability long before the bond is half or more paid off.
other than trading resources in multiplayer there are also the "great works". specific parts of the region will be reserved for these "works", which are items like a massive solar power grid array the size of a city, or the construction of a major international airport. the construction of these items require massive amounts of resources. a sprawled out international airport might require a great deal of alloys, and electronics and refined ore, not to mention the immense price tag for example... a single city might be able to provide enough resources to get the job done in single player mode on a long enough time line... but it is far more likely that such an undertaking would either bankrupt the single playing loner, or exhaust him of a precious resource long before the project was completed, but the idea is that each city from the region will contribute to a mutually beneficial project like an international airport.
once the airport is completed, trade dramatically would increase, exports and imports would climb ever higher, tourists would pour in to visit your buffet of casinos. of course you still have the option of including a small airport within the confines if your city, however it takes up space, and depending on what your cities "specialty" is, a local airport might not be necessary or even productive enough to justify the use of precious space.
the single player is not at a total disadvantage, a single player can serve as mayor on multiple cities simultaneously within a "private region" which other players cannot participate in. A single player can develop and control multiple cities at once, but this can be a headache.
one problem with sim city 5 - whether intentional or not - is the lack of space in which to build your city. Unlike cities XL for example, the player is limited to a rather small box shaped border in which the city must remain and the player cannot build anything beyond this border. the unfortunate side effect is that building space... much like coal, water and oil, becomes a precious commodity that you WILL ultimately run out of. by the time you have 80,000 to 100,000 people living in your city there is hardly a square inch of real estate which is not occupied. so, when another recycling center, or an extension of your powerplant, or another fire department is warranted you have to start being very careful about what you chose to tear down to make room for the essential new building.
there is a "great work" called "Arcology" which the players can choose to team up and build somewhere on the region map - once built it serves as a massive "green ecosystem living space" for the sims living in your region... the concept is that once it is completed, most (perhaps all)of your sims will choose to live within this arcology community freeing up room within the confines of your box for you to expand factories, casinos, office buildings etc - the sims would then commute by any number of means into your city to work and play but would keep residence within the arcology complex.
its an interesting concept in the evolution of the sims within the sim city franchise. perhaps a utopia of sorts is possible with the arcology construction which would free the player to focus strictly on specific city functions and building types. (obviously i have not completed the "great works" of arcology yet) I can envision a city free of traffic, without the precious space consumed by sprawling neighborhoods, space which can be used for office buildings, businesses, tourist attractions, factories. A city in which garbage disposal and the health impacts of pollution are a thing of the past. you name it... but until i manage to accomplish this, it is all assumption on how arcology will work.
for now however i will have to deal with the minor annoyances: like a business closing down because they are worried about crime, despite the fact that one neighbor is a business with booming profits and the other neighbor is - - the police station! or the various houses being abandoned with little explanation other than "not enough money" or the factory that closes down with the simple explanation "no skilled workers" despite the fact that you have numerous elementary schools, high schools, a community college and a major university in your city that should be cranking out a suit and tie wearing army of skilled workers.
of course if all does not go to plan, and these little annoyances rub you the wrong way you still have the ability to strike down on your subjects with a giant lizzard, or tornado or earthquake etc
In multiplayer mode however, these disasters occur at random and the player only has control of the disasters after unlocking certain achievements, and for such an accurate and authentic city simulation i was surprised to see the giant lizard included as a disaster you might possibly face in the game. Obviously the lizard was a throwback to the old original SimCity games, so in that way it is pretty neat i guess, but it detracts from the realism of the simulation when you are faced with a lizard attack... but that is the least of the disastrous problems in keeping with the modern zombie fascination the kids these days seem to have, your city can experience an actual zombie apocalypse as one of the disasters.
you read that right, and it is perhaps the most crippling disaster the game has to offer, a disaster which unfortunately one of my better cities experienced first hand. zombies roamed the streets, dozens of buildings lie dormant and obviously damaged and abandoned with the pop up description when moused over "Consumed by zombies", the sounds of gun shots rang out in the streets, sirens waled constantly as police and firefighters appeared overwhelmed. In the end my economy was almost completely ruined, and at least 40-50% of the buildings in my city had to be demolished and rebuilt... not to mention the reduction in population. I wager that if left unattended for a period of time for a shower or a smoke break for example... if a zombie apocalypse within SimCity 5 were to occur during the absence it could almost completely destroy a city before you ever knew what happened.
and this is another place where multiplayer shines. Following a major disaster like an earthquake for example, neighboring cities can assist with medical and emergency services, just as they would in real life... Thats right, one mayer can offer a number of police, fire and ambulance units to another city temporarily after that city has experienced a disaster. additionally, if one player is just establishing his city, and has not yet budgeted for a police force, a neighboring player can send police units to help control crime (or fire units to fight fires etc) until the new player is on his feet.
i have always asked of the sim city series "whats the end game?" - im not accustomed to playing a game which appears to have no end. modern video games are like books or movies, there is a clear beginning, a story, a climactic crescendo and a conclusion. Sim city - much like pong - would theoretically go on forever (assuming you had the digital dollars with which to keep managing your city as going broke is the only way to lose) it is the never ending story of video games.
im still scratching my head as to the "point" of playing the game... it seems to have no conclusion, there is no end, and the only goal is to build an ever larger city. But with sim city 5 and the arcology concept - the goal very well could be to migrate your city into this new "green community" type of futuristic existence... but once you do that - still you could likely continue to play... forever if you could live that long.
so whats the verdict?
In my opinion this is probably the best version of sim city yet created - despite the teething issues with the servers experienced early in the release ( i have experienced no problems as of the time of this writing)
It sticks closely enough to its classic roots to be familiar if not charming, yet it offers so many new concepts and so many new ways to play that it is set uniquely apart from its predecessors.
If you are a fan of the sim city series... Sim City 5 wont disappoint.
If you just kinda like to build a big city and then smash it with disasters... the single player component wont disappoint either! the fires, the booms and the various disaster effects are satisfying. tall buildings will even do a vertical fall when you use the bull dozer on them, appearing as if they had been taken down by demolition charges.
i would say the game is a solid 7.5 out of 10
the only thing preventing a higher score is lack of replayability... i know in the end before long i will have shelved this title just like the rest of the sim city games i have played, simply succumbing to indifference after dedicating many hours to virtual city planning.