I don’t know why, but I was feeling the mood to give SimCity another shot so I bought the expansion which deals with futuristic stuff and decided to sit down and play SimCity again. As you may or may not remember from my previous post, my main gripes about it were that you couldn’t play offline, its reliance on having multiple cities, small city areas, and unrealistic population numbers.
Well, to my surprise, they have recently announced that they are putting out an update that would allow players to play offline. About freaking time. I wonder whether it was people continuing to complain one year later or that even with all the multiplayer stuff, people generally just played in private regions because the multiplay was borked due to griefing. It’s also good because the first time I tried to play again, I couldn’t because the servers were down. Which I thought was funny that almost a year later you still had issues.
I will say, that playing the game again separated me a little bit from the drama of the launch. I decided to just take the game from what its worth and not worry about the online aspect of it. And to be honest, I do enjoy the game, but I wouldn’t rate it better than Simcity 4, Simcity 3000, or Simcity 2000. In fact, I think I might have slightly more enjoyment out of Simcity 1 than this one, but I would say it was at about the same level.
The game is more balanced than what it was before. Ores, Oils, Water, and other expendable resources don’t seem to go away quite as fast. I remember water being an issue with me having 15 or more towers in a single city and running out of water. It seems far more realistic now. Traffic also doesn’t seem quite as bad either. A lot of the general bugs just seem better.
I still take issue with their population numbers. It actually seems even more glaring than before now that they have the mega towers which allow for massive amounts of people to reside in them because even with 3 mega towers in a city and completely packed with skyscrapers… I still seem to only have 110,000 people, half the population of my home town that contains not a single skyscraper in it. This also goes to the relatively small area.
I also feel like, while other Simcities have the potential to be never ending, this one definitely feels like it has an end. This happens because after a few days of play, I just don’t have anything to do. I have all the big cities and there isn’t a ton of room left over to do more. And there isn’t much to do elsewise. I have a city with 4 mega towers, the big police precinct, hospital, fire department, town hall maxed out, 2 omega factories, 2 oil wells, 1 ore mine, a trade depot, a train station, a level 4 academy, and $3 million in cash. And then I look at the cash and go, well I have no room to build stuff and I don’t have a heck of a lot to build so I guess I’m done with this city. I feel like part of the reason they created a reliance on other cities was that they knew the depth of the game wasn’t very high.
For the Futuristic stuff… overall it’s cool. I kind of wish they actually made it time specific, but instead they made it based off of buildings you put down. If they did it that way, they at least should have made the futuristic buildings based off research to make it feel like you were entering the future. But many buildings are ready for you out of the gate, and most others are only hampered by money. The art is pretty fantastic though. I like the drones from the Omega Factory, but I still absolutely hate the mining system they created and Omega follows that. I do like the Academy though as that follows the research system that Universities use.
A weird thing about this game is that it does get me in the mood for SimCity, but it doesn’t actually fulfill the SimCity mood that it creates. Which tells me that it isn’t really much SimCity. I may give a try to Cities in Motion or Cities XL or even Tropico. All of which I have gotten for super cheap prices. And if those don’t fill that need, maybe I will just buy SimCity 2000 for super cheap and DRM Free from GoG.