14 DAY TRIAL // 
I loved SimCity when I was young and, at least in part, the game might be blamed for my interest in administration and politics.
I remember playing it alongside other city management titles like Pharaoh or Caesar, trying to create the best settlements I could, looking out for the happiness of my citizens, while also trying to balance making a profit with causing as little damage as I could to the environment.
SimCity was a way to realize utopia when it came to living conditions, something which seemed very important to a young man from Eastern Europe, that area dominated by apartment blocks that looked like gray slabs of concrete.
I was escaping via video games and SimCity gave me a way to actually model the towns I wanted to live in rather than unhappily experience the one that reality had thrust upon me.
The biggest problem I had with the series, before it became bloated with features it scarcely needed, was that my citizens were never able to express their gratitude towards their kind mayor because of engine limitations.
The new game in the series, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts, solves that big problem and delivers a city building experience that tries to adequately provide depth for long-term fans, while also deploying a visual spectacle designed to attract younger gamers.
It might also disappoint those who know the series from previous installments because it’s limited in some severe ways, and there’s a constant feeling that the cities are too small for what they are supposed to do.
Since SimCity was launched, the game has been plagued by connectivity and server issues, with many people unable to play because they could not authenticate via Origin.
When I first launched the game, I had no trouble logging in but, since then, the game repeatedly lost connection and I was forced to sit staring at a screen counting down the time until the next attempt to link to the servers.
EA promises that the situation will improve in the near future, but any statements from the publisher should be taken with a grain of salt.
Story
The core premise of SimCity has remained unchanged: the player is a personification of the mayor spirit, guiding a city towards prosperity or disaster via a large array of social, economic and political measures.
The SimCity administrator enjoys far more power than his real life counterpart would, and there’s a helpful cast of characters, all of them bureaucrats, who can offer advice and guide him to the best outcome in any situation.
The reboot also adds more populist touches by allowing missions to come from the community, which can task the player with certain objectives as he develops a particular city.
The writing quality is high in SimCity, and I often laughed when I read building descriptions because they tend to subtly mock the typical political and economic speeches of the moment.
Gameplay
SimCity is an easy to understand game: there are buildings and action that a player understands because he lives in a settlement and understands that an inhabitant needs power, water and a place to live before he can make any long-term plans.
In the long term, the needs of the masses expand to encompass education, health care, protection from fire and crime and beauty in the form of parks.
Gamers have to balance a budget, choose the right areas to develop, place important industries, give the city as much efficiency as possible, while also dealing with long-term problems like pollution, urban blight and outdated businesses.
It’s a great experience and city growth feels organic, each small decision having a clear impact on the way the area develops and on the way citizens react.
Once a city is running smoothly, players can turn their eye towards commerce, collaboration with other settlements and joint investment in projects that can benefit all those involved.
This is one of the great improvements in the new SimCity, the fact that those who live in the settlements can voice an opinion, in Simglish and text form.
It creates a clear connection and it makes me really sad when I have to move houses next to industrial areas, or when I remove a clinic because I can no longer afford it.
The city building design is pretty, functional, and engaging, and I can see fans spending hundreds of hours perfecting their layouts and their development plans.
The biggest problem with the new SimCity is that it operates on a small scale, with sometimes claustrophobic boundaries that will force players to constantly tweak placements in order to increase population density and fit in as many structures as possible.
This is somewhat compensated by the fact that players now have access to entire regions, which can have as many as 16 cities and 4 spaces for joint projects, allowing each small area to specialize, and one person to play the entire region as some sort of connected megalopolis.
Graphics and audio
The new engine is quite an impressive feat, and SimCity has never looked so lovely before nor has the on-screen action been so mesmerizing.
Previous titles in the series were often boring, even when the player was in charge of a full city filled with citizens and businesses, mainly because players lacked a clear spectacle to engage with.
The rebooted SimCity uses the GlassBox engine to create an organic-looking world, with plenty of interactions and small details that will take gamers many hours to notice.
The tilt-shift influence, which some have criticized when the game was first shown, makes sense given the smaller size of the cities and the sense of familiarity that Maxis seems to be aiming for.
There are times when I was so captured by the beauty of the cities I was creating that I actually postponed performing in-game actions in order to continue watching life happening before my eyes, like in a perfect terrarium filled with pretty simulated citizens.
Maxis has also done a great job with the various layouts, delivering a lot of important information to the player in a visually-appealing manner.
Multiplayer
Ever since it was announced, Maxis has insisted that the new SimCIty is a connected experience, designed to be played by gamers who share an area and influence each other in both direct and subtle ways.
The idea is sound but, at the moment, the frailty of the servers is a problem that will probably drive most gamers to make their regions private and simply act as mayors for all the potential cities.
The fact that there’s no clear way of taking a player who decides to be a jerk out of an area can also be a problem in the long term, especially for true fans who want to continue optimizing their cities for months.
The game succeeds in its second endeavor superbly but, unfortunately, fails to fully flesh out the first idea. That can lead to some disjoined gameplay, and SimCity is also currently suffering from problems with servers overload, which are keeping some players from actually accessing the product they bought. I will continue playing SimCity for a while but, at the time, fans would be well served by waiting for the connectivity problems to clear up before making a purchase.
The Good
The Bad
Conclusion
