simcity pc game review
Test: SimCityThe return of SimCity is bound to be a great video game event. Head-on images, stars in their eyes, anyone who has spent hours maintaining their city to make it a hymn to Metropolis knows what I am talking about. Myself, I was excited to test the new installment of the patriarch of the City builders. The greater the disappointment ...
But above all, let's go back to basics. This new SimCity is to be contemplated under the sign of connectivity. One of its great spearheads is the possibility of playing in multi, connecting cities by regions (up to 16 cities in a single region), allowing various transfers and interactivities from one city to another. A very exciting and ambitious project which we will come back to later. We also know that this episode intended to bring together both the laymen and the old men of the old woman, a delicate marriage and often a joke. With this in mind, we can start our first city.
THE BEGINNINGS
After having seen or not the initial tutorial, the first thing to take into account is obviously its position in the region. Not only do small gauges allow you to identify the resources available (ore, coal, oil, wind and water), but you also have to check its connectivity with the surrounding cities, whether by roads, railways or seaways ( if you want, you will have the opportunity to do a municipal airport later). Once you have made your choice, you are given 50,000 simflouz, a small piece of motorway to which you can connect and a good pat on the back as if to say "Come on, get on with it, son!". Of course, the first choice is to opt for an energy source in line with the resources available. If your soil is rich in oil, you might as well go to the oil plant, even if you will also have to build enough to drill. Ditto for water, essential, which will ask you to place water towers on the available water tables. No need to bother making connections later since these two elements (as well as the evacuation of wastewater) are done automatically by the roads, a detail to which we will return.LITTLE CITY WILL BECOME BIG
But for life to be good, you still need to have citizens. We thus find the eternal RCI system (for residential, commercial and industrial districts) dear to the series. You indicate areas along the roads according to what you want to see growing in the next few days and then observe the workers embarking on pretty constructions. Here, care must be taken to leave room to see the buildings evolve (to the point of becoming skyscrapers), but also to use adequate roads. A building can never reach its full potential if it is only served by a narrow lane. We also find classic administrations, such as fire stations, police stations, clinics, schools or public transport, which can then evolve practically room by room. Indeed, if necessary, you can add an additional small fire truck in a barracks or even classrooms in the local high school. Obviously, this requires each time thousands (even tens of thousands) of simflouz, not counting the maintenance, but also space, an element which will definitely be a real problem in this SimCity."CANNOT SHAVE A ROAD WITHOUT DELETING THE ADJACENT BUILDINGS"
Because so far, I was only asking the basic principle, and it will still have to attack one of the recurring problems of this opus. You will regularly have to reshape your neighborhoods to add a building here and there, sometimes essential for the well-being of your citizens. But for that, it is sometimes necessary to touch up the roads, which poses a big, big concern: it is impossible to raze a road without automatically deleting all the adjacent buildings! To be exact, a building without a road cannot exist, even for a second, the time to redevelop the neighborhood (whether the game is paused or not). If it is already painful for RCIs, it is even more so for administrative buildings since you have no way of accurately gauging the space required if you have not already traveled before. And if you've been on the road ... Well it's too late my little lady! Unless you have the compass in your eye, regularly expect to bulldoze bitumen, and all the muck that you had put in it. And believe me, the roads are expensive. Even if it is possible to transform a medium density street into an advanced density street without going through the destruction box, it is not the same to transform a street into an avenue, it does not matter if only one side of the street is occupied by constructions. By the way, the famous arrival of curved roads is nice, but still it would have been necessary that the buildings could follow. These remain very square, it is a big loss of space.
SLIMCITY
And there, you say to yourself that it would be enough to build a little further to be sure to have enough to place new buildings ... And that's what I would also have said if the maps were not awfully tiny. It takes no more than two hours of actual play to fully fill the card at maximum speed (there are three speed levels, not counting the break). And again, it is in the case where half of the card is not submerged by water. Suddenly, we quickly made a small equation in his head: small size + difficulty in rearranging the areas, would not life take a hit? If we will abstain concerning the general lifespan for the moment, that of your cities is indeed minimized compared to the previous episodes. In fact, the title invents the principle of disposable cities, prompting you to quickly create another city in the same area, which we will talk about when we talk about regions. In fact, we really realize this with resource management. Because coal is good, but once the vein underground is exhausted, this is your city in limbo if it was your main income. And since you have to shave half the city to change lanes and find other ways to evolve ... The same goes for the groundwater which is running out, forcing you to place a new pumping station elsewhere, which costs a lot of money and requires you to destroy an entire neighborhood. And waiting for the rainy season for a water table to fill up again is very long.THE MULTI ABOVE ALL
What is surprising with all this is that at the base, the title seemed to have been built with this perspective "players creating several cities" in mind, which is all the more abstruse when we see that everything has been made to highlight the multi. Indeed, there is a good chance that the other cities of the region are already taken by other players thus obliging you to stay on yours while trying to reshape the whole despite the enormous constraints. Of course, the multi brings many elements that require the player to review the concept of town planning. Your residents can look for work elsewhere and your stores can attract suburban customers for example. But the most interesting is that it is the same for crime or pollution. Which can cause you to grumble against the neighbor unable to manage his populace. Conversely, you can take advantage of or lend services such as fire fighting, civil protection or public transport, just as you can sell / buy electricity or a garbage disposal service. But the main interest revolves mainly around the trade of your productions, whether it is the extraction of ore / petroleum / coal or other more advanced technology, linked to your specialization.EACH ITS SPECIALTY
Specialization is an important point which alone can mean the death or expansion of your city. If you meet certain criteria, you will be able to access new constructions that will give a real character to your city. Do you have high-tech industries? Get into electronic chips. Do you have ore under your land? Extract them then build a foundry. Do you prefer tourists? Build monuments or become the empire of the game by placing casinos ... Paths that are laid out that are expensive, but that can generate great profits if you have done it right. If everyone leaves in a different direction in the same region, this greatly facilitates exchanges, thus bringing real emulation, verifiable via a fiddling with statistics. But the must of cohesion work, these are the regional construction sites thanks to which a group of cities can come together for a long-term project requiring colossal work. Whether for an international airport or a space station, it will require not only a lot of money, but also specific components which can only be obtained through specializations. Titanic projects with colossal contributions which undoubtedly constitute the nerve of the war. Finally, be aware that if certain resources are absent from your region, you can also fall back on world production, with prices fluctuating according to supply and demand. It's hard to gauge the effectiveness of such a system other than in the very long term.BE LISTENING
But if regional projects can get a lot of your attention, don't forget that you have a city to run, which won't be an easy task. To tell the truth, if it were necessary to speak about the difficulty of SimCity, I would be very annoyed because many elements seem strangely random. First of all, note that it is possible for you to listen to your citizens, not only thanks to numerous maps and other very practical tables but also by clicking on small icons appearing on the buildings. The director of the power plant tells you that you are running out of coal? Improve your production with one more extractor or buy it on the world market. Does the local police station run out of space for criminals? Expand them, or build more schools to educate citizens and reduce crime.GOGO DISASTERS
Each problem has several solutions and, on paper, you really seem to be managing everything. Yes but there you are, some unexplained phenomena can wipe out your efforts in no time. For example, overnight you can see crime going away for no reason, when you have schools everywhere and police on every street corner. Ditto for the population which can descend from 50,000 inhabitants in just 2 minutes when all the criteria, starting with your popularity, are green. Worse, disasters (which cannot be disabled) seem incredibly recurrent. To give you an idea, one of my cities suffered a sudden nuclear fusion (when the employees were marked as "safe"), the invasion of a Godzillesque monster, a meteor shower and an alien invasion in just 7 hours (real time eh, not in-game). Even funnier? While the city was on fire and blood, the population increased from 90,000 to 120,000 without any explanation."YOUR INHABITANTS ARE CRETS"
Amazing elements that would make us almost forget the famous Glassbox engine, which allows us to follow our little inhabitants precisely, with AI and beautiful 3D. It is true that walking in the city at ground level to watch people cross the road, wait for the bus or go to work has this exciting little side that we have been impatiently waiting for in the series, especially when all this is managed in real time. The same goes for the buildings and the inscriptions above (in French please) which really give life to the whole. However, we can see two small flats. The first is that once the "discovery" aspect has passed, you will be content to look down on your city like any good self-respecting mayor. The second, much more damaging, is that when you take a closer look, you will realize that your inhabitants are morons. Raging, especially when it comes to your firefighters, able to lengthen the course or turn in circles in a corner when you have to put out a fire right next to it. Since arrests, fire extinctions or any other displacement in your city is effective in real time, there is reason to go crazy. Another example, traffic jams. You may have the most gigantic avenues, an ultra-efficient tram system and bus stops in all the streets, it is sometimes impossible to unclog certain routes. Lack of luck, it was these that had decided to take the 16 garbage trucks you own, thus leaving the litter litter your streets. And when you realize that these traffic jams are caused because cars go around roundabouts endlessly, it's drama ...
WHAT AUDIENCE?
In the end, it is quite circumspect that I am forced to conclude SimCity as well: despite serious ambitions and undoubtedly a desire to do well, this opus fails on gameplay elements however essential such as ergonomics, the logic of events or the general balance. If some, ignoring its faults, may manage to find their happiness, many will be disappointed. The most worrying thing is that between its random difficulty (and the lack of information on certain problems) which seems to distance it from neophytes and the principle of "disposable cities" which could hold up old veterans, it is difficult to understand which SimCity audience will eventually convince ...
The notes
+ Positive points
Very advanced financial management
Interactivity in multiplayer
3D in SimCity
The specializations of the cities
Negative points
Far too small cities
An ultra painful road system
Impossible to choose the direction of a building
Too frequent disasters
Sometimes disastrous AI
Many inconsistencies
Lack of explanations for neophytes
Redoing cities often is not great
No metro
SimCity is far, far from what we expected. In absolute terms, the system of city specializations as well as regional and international trade and exchanges seemed to be a real improvement, driven by a Glassbox engine and a 3D highly anticipated in the series. But damn, that the end result is scary! The tiny size of cities and the proliferation of administrative buildings mean that you have to destroy it all the time to rebuild, and the lack of ergonomics, especially because of the roads, makes this job tedious. In addition, the Sims' AI, which now has a real impact on the gameplay, turns out to be buggy, which regularly makes situations outrageous. In short, THE disappointment at the start of the year.
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