Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

I’ve been sandbagging this review.  I admit it – I’ve not been able to nail down this game.  There are aspects that I love, and there are aspects that I’m not fond of.  Some days I can play SimCity Societies for hours, and other times I take one look at my city and then proceed to burn it down with player-triggered disasters.  I just can’t figure out if I love or hate this game, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

Caesar IV / Children of the Nile developer Tilted Mill Entertainment is the team behind SimCity Societies, which is a bit of a departure as Maxis had built every Sim title previous to this one.  Setting out to change the focus of the title, SimCity Societies focuses heavily on the interaction between the society of your city as the name suggests.  You’ll certainly shape and design your city, but could a game that focuses on interrelations between your citizens successfully meld the two concepts together? 

Fire – in any Sim game it is your worst enemy.  Since your Sims relied on books to not set themselves on fire in The Sims, you dealt with it a lot in that game.  Clearly these Sims live in my city and they don’t have their books.  As I watch the fire spread I frantically scour my city for my fire station.  By the time I’ve found it, double clicked on it, clicked the dispatch button, and scrolled back to the burning tenement the fire has spread to several other buildings. I can only watch in horror as the whole thing goes up in a blaze.  Somewhere in the back of my brain I think “Does our Governor have to call the fire department directly, or do they do their job without direct executive involvement?” and I curse the interface.  Oh well, at least the blaze was pretty.  SimCity Societies has a nice graphical presentation, but the user interface can be lacking at times. 

The back of the box reveals that you need a 1.7 GHz CPU and a half a gig of RAM to run this game, but only asks for a 128mb video card to play.  If you can only meet that minimum spec and not exceed it by leaps and bounds, you need not apply.  I am running a Dual Core 6600, 2GB of RAM, and an 8800 GTX and still found framerate issues when my city had grown to epic proportions and I was zoomed out completely.  Granted, managing at this level isn’t something you’ll do every day, but it does demonstrate just how hard the game will push your system.   Much of the framerate issues were mitigated by the recent patches to the game, but there is no denying that the game requires a bit of oomph. 

If you’ve got the kit to run it, SimCity Societies can be a great looking game.  Much of what you’ll do in the game affects how your buildings look, so they are somewhat exaggerated versions of themselves.  If you build a green city, expect to see clean lines and little touches like flowers and bright buildings.  If you want to rake your city clean and create a business juggernaut that spews corruption and pollution (read: Detroit) then you’ll notice that your buildings will be run down, often having their windows boarded up, their surfaces yellowed by the stains of your factory output.  You’ll rake in cash, but your city may suffer.  On the other hand, you can also create a technological wonder city full of neon and glass that’ll have a more ‘Asian’ effect on your city.  You can even lock down your country with an Authoritarian rule which will sprout little cameras everywhere to ‘help’ your citizens remain ‘safe’.  Pick enough objects from one particular type of city and your city will suddenly and drastically change. 

There is no shortage of animations in SimCity Societies.  Since you can zoom in almost to a level where you could believe you are playing The Sims, there is a great bit of detail to be seen.  Mimes (the less evil variety of clowns) will patrol the city and become locked in their invisible (and somebody should tell them, imaginary) boxes while they wait for Mimeageddon (no, I’m not kidding), helicopters will lift off of pads on top of buildings, Sims will play baseball in their fenced in playground, and trash will swirl in the streets.  When special events, such as a city-wide Golden Ticket search (without the creepy Johnny Depp wooden-teeth performance) kick off you’ll get to see your citizenry react accordingly.  My only complaint here is really that it really doesn’t have much of a point.  What I mean by this is that the game rivals real life in its tedium – your Sims simply go about their daily life of working and sleeping without a great deal of anything else going on in their life.  It is a sad reflection to be honest. 

All in all the game is actually quite nice to look at, even if it is a bit too colorful for its own good.  The way the city can change based on your decisions is a welcome addition to the genre/series, if only you could easily spot your important utilities more efficiently.

There are a few games where the soundtrack really sticks in your brain, and the SimCity series is one of them.  The quirky and relaxing background music just lies under your feet like a soft carpet.  You know it is there, but it only serves as a soft cushion for your tailbone as you log the innumerable hours required to really build a worthwhile city.  SimCity Societies, despite the switch of developers, managed to capture the flavor of those previous titles and created a soundtrack that matches the colorful buildings without smacking you in the face with it like that co-worker that always insists on showing you pictures of his kids.

The sound effects in SimCity Societies are what you’d expect.  The Sims still speak their crazy moon language, requiring you to read their body language and inflection as much as their mood text.  The bus issues a throaty growl as it takes Sims to and from work.  Nightclubs pump out a little bit of music to attract Sim passers-by.  All in all, the city certainly sounds alive.  The only complaint I have is that your event locations (fire, attack-mimes, etc.) are overwhelmingly louder than everything else around them when you hover over them directly.  A little audio balance would go a long way with those sound effects, but overall I’d have to say that it is a solid effort from the folks at Tilted Windmill.

In a game like SimCity Societies, the controls are fairly straightforward.  If you have played any of the previous titles or any other game in the builder genre you know what to expect - the mouse controls movement with a handful of keys handling the camera panning.  SimCity Societies doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of control, but it doesn't make any mistakes either.  The area where it suffers a bit is in the interface.  Even if you don't count the pathetic leaflet that passes for a book these days, it was surprising how little help the tutorial is beyond the initial setup.  The game is fairly easy, but newcomers may be overwhelmed by the hundreds of objects they can place, or they may be confused as to how to unlock them.  I personally don't need a great deal of handholding on this genre, but new fans to the series may be a little lost.  With a guide book this thin you may just stay that way.

Maxis didn’t invent the God-game – that honor goes to game visionary Peter Molyneux.  That said, they sure did perfect it, didn’t they?  The SimCity series has been a staple in city building games, setting the bar that others might copy.  Players took control of nearly every aspect of government from taxes to plumbing in a bid to create the best city possible.  Facing the challenges of zoning out your city only to find your best laid plans crushed by the pressing needs of your Sims for expansion was part of the fun, with the end result being a relatively detailed game that required planning and strategy concealed within a simple interface.  Tilted Mill worked with EA to create a game that would break that mould, eschewing some of the governmental responsibilities only to replace them with social and inter-societal responsibilities.   You’d be able to build almost any type of city you’d like – a green city, a corporate thug city, a cyberpunk city, a police-state city, and many more – there is only one catch…somewhere along the line the difficulty was somehow removed. 

As I said, playing SimCity was about balancing the fiscal, planning, and expansion aspects of a city.  With SimCity Society it is more about planning our how certain values will allow your city to grow as a society.  There are six aspects of your buildings that affect the societal outcome of your city, namely productivity, prosperity, knowledge, authority, spirituality, and creativity.  Each building will provide one or more of these aspects in varying amounts, some at the cost of another aspect.  Other buildings may incur certain mood-affecting risks such as the propensity towards alcoholism for bars and injuries at baseball fields while yielding a certain level of happiness for your Sims.  There are a total of 500 objects with more coming courtesy of fan-made mods on a daily basis so I couldn’t even begin to explain all of the possible balancing scenarios that occur here.  As an example let’s say that you have to have X number of prosperity in your city overall to build something creative.  Sorting through the aforementioned well implemented filter system you can see which buildings will provide the needed amount of prosperity.  Since there is no zoning you simply select the building, pay for it, and drop it into place.  The first time I did this I remarked out loud “Wow, that was simple”.   The more I did it the more it dawned on me that this was one of the major components that was now missing in the series – the planning.  With the ability to plunk down any building as long as you had the room, the need to be mindful of future expansion was almost negated.  No longer did I have to worry about losing money to rezone an area for another type.  The obvious reasoning being the included ‘Achievement’ reward system that gives you objects like special skyscrapers for achieving certain milestones.  You might recall something similar (ha! SIMilar…I can’t believe it took me that long to get that pun working) in SimCity 3000.

Once I realized that the zoning was gone I began to find other things that had changed.  Water, tax, and part of power had changed or been removed completely.  No longer did you have to worry about a water source, as apparently nature provides without your input.  Similarly, your chosen power producer gives power to individual buildings, meaning that if you brownout your power grid it only affects new buildings instead of plunging the entire city into darkness.  The tax system has been removed completely.  In place of the tax system is an income system where certain buildings provide a small bit of income each day, while others have to be 'charged up' and activated to generate cash.  Some buildings provide more than others but require more Sims to remain fully staffed.  The problem is that it is essentially so simple that you can almost spend with impunity.  Metaphorically speaking, if you need more money just plant more money trees. 

Managing the Sims themselves is a fairly simple process.  If you zoom in and select one at random they’ll gladly tell you what is on their mind and how you can improve it.  Since there are no advisors you can simply fulfill whatever desires they have and all will be made right.  I found that I could very easily maintain an ecstatic populous who produced money by the truckload and lived in a completely green city without crime – the pinnacle of any SimCity.  There are special Sims that spawn from certain buildings such as Tourists, Secret Enforcers, Farmers, Entertainers, Monks, Researchers, and Artists that confer small benefits or detriments to the Sims around them.  They don't have a very large area of affect, so you'll likely not notice their presence most of the time.  Growing that city was fairly painless as well as the road system has also been simplified.  

If you are looking for SimCity 5, you won’t find it here.  The game takes the series in a completely different direction, and the results are mixed.  The difficulty feels like training wheels, but the concepts are certainly new and interesting.  There is no shortage of things to do, if only it wasn’t so easy to do them.

This category is split into the initial value and the replay value of a title.  This category is truly ‘tilted’ (ha! Another pun!) as the replay value is certainly heavily dependent on your initial experience.  If you find that the societal balance game is compelling enough to keep you going you might find a want to mess with the fantastic XML editing that can adjust the game to your whim.  If you unlock the 500+ buildings you can also easily get more of them by simply hitting the official site or any number of fan sites that have sprung up.  If you know C++ programming and XML you could essentially take this entire game apart and rebuild it from the ground up, but that kinda defeats the point of buying what is in the box doesn’t it? SimCity Societies is as mixed as the very societies you’ll be simulating.  While the bright and colorful city puts a fresh coat of paint on the series, the occasional framerate hits on high end hardware doesn’t bode well for those on more moderate machines.   The music is fantastic and is certainly a high point for this game.  The sandbox nature in a SimCity game conveys near limitless potential, but only if the game is compelling enough to play in the first place.  I just can’t help but feel that this sandbox has plenty of toys in it, but they just aren’t as much fun to play with as they could be.

Gaming Trend Score

71

1. Graphics: 83
2. Audio: 83
3. Controls: 70
4. Gameplay: 65
5. Value/Replay: 60
6. OVERALL:71