The games in the SimCity series have steadily gotten more and more complicated. I understand it’s because the superfans of the series really like micromanaging every aspect of their little simulated people’s lives. So you keep getting more and more things that you can do, which means that you have more and more things to think about as you’re mayoring in your city. First you have to create appropriate zones, then you have to give them power, then they want water, then they want roads, then they want highways, then they want a place to stash their trash, and etc., etc., etc. Your Sims are very needy.
And you, as mayor have to do absolutely everything by yourself, while listening to your advisors, of course. Or you could do what I did and completely ignore them, build the city however you want, and then watch as nobody moves in, you run out of money and the game ends.
But assuming you do manage to make a city that people want to live in you have gobs of information at your fingertips, hidden away in all kinds of menus. You can see where the traffic’s congested the most, you can see who does and doesn’t have water service, or how your rating as mayor is, or where the crime is, or where sphere of influence is for the various schools in your city, or lots more stuff.
The game is really just more of a refinement of SimCity 3000, which was a refinement of SimCity 2000, which was a refinement of the original game. And each time they make a new iteration of the game, they pile on more stuff to do and to manage, which is fine for the really hardcore city manager types, but kind of overwhelming for a neophyte. Heck, it was a lot for me to handle, and I’m an old hand at Simming around.
However, there were two things in particular that I did think were kind of neat about this game. First was that if you had a copy of The Sims on your computer, you could have one of your Sims from that game move into your city and tell you what he or she thinks of it. Then you kind follow what they do throughout the days and such. Kind of an interesting crossover.
The other thing, though, is the inclusion of Rush Hour. Rush Hour is essentially an expansion to the base SimCity 4 game that allows you as mayor to drive around your city to do silly little missions. The missions are pretty lame, and the vehicles are pretty well uncontrollable, but it kind of gives you some insight into how brilliantly or, in my case, how poorly the roads in your fair city are laid out.
There was just so much to do in this game that after about a dozen or so hours into it, tweaking the settings for the trash, the water, the police, the education system, zoning for more properties, poring over traffic density maps, stomping out fires, and so on, I just kind of got a case of ‘minutiae overload’ and I put the game up on the shelf in indefinite hiatus.