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Review: Sim City 4Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.2.6 Review Date: August 13, 2003
Before we go any further, let's clear up one thing: Sim City 4 is not a game. It's a high school extra credit report. It's a college civil engineering course project. It's the closest Gray Davis should have ever come to governing the people. But, it's not a game. Of course, that doesn't mean it can't be fun. Let's also clear up one other thing: This is the first time I've ever played a Sim City game. I've played The Sims and most of its expansion packs, I've played Railroad Tycoon and various other industry specific sims, and I even have an old copy of Sim Ant still lying in my closet, but this is the first time I've played Sim City, the game which pretty much launched the whole sim genre. Or was that Utopia on the Intellivision?
I call this the Girder and Panel Play Set school of construction. Remember Girder and Panel? It was a collection of plastic beams, supports and roads with which you could construct buildings and bridges for your Matchbox cars. The best thing about spending a couple hours constructing such towers was spending a couple minutes destroying them with my Godzilla toys. The developers of Sim City understand this, and they present numerous, wonderful methods of raining destruction upon your town. Let's get back to that, though. First, there's the troublesome process of building something to destroy. You'd either better be familiar with the Sim City system or you'd better have tremendous patience, because there's not much in either the manual or the tutorial to help you build a better city. The manual details the different tools, but tells you little about when and why to use them. The tutorials show you the very basics of how to zone a city and take care of it, offering no strategic hints whatsoever. Okay, so you know how to zone for residential and commercial areas, how to build a school and place a water tower, but where would you want to do this? How far from the gas plant should you build your hospital? What type of road is best for a particular sized neighborhood? The answers to these questions come only from experience, from the internet, or, of course, from the official strategy guide.
Okay, out of the tutorials and into the game. The beginning map means more than that you can decide where to build your city; it means you can build multiple cities that can interact with one another. Create a thriving metropolis in one, a small town in another, and a beach front village in the third, then connect them all with various modes of transportation so they support one another. You get to be mayor of them all, which I guess means you're governor. Or, heck, let's just call you a god, since you also get powers far beyond those of mortal men. I did mention the giant robot, right? If you're like me, you'll have a hard enough time managing one city, let alone an entire network. Each factory, road and police station you add means one more element to manage. Some of this can function well on its own, but most will need help from time to time. You can click on any structure to get information on that item and how well it's servicing the community, or you can go directly to the community to find out what they need. Quite often, the game makes obvious what you need to build your city. Despite what you may have heard in the 80s, you can't build a city on rock and roll. For instance, if houses don't have power, a lightning bolt will appear above them. Okay, build some sort of power plant within reach of the houses. Problem solved. Certain elements are much more subtle, though. You factories may look like they're doing okay, but it's only after pulling up information on them individually that you will learn the roads reaching them aren't wide enough to offer sufficient shipping or that the crime rate is hurting business. As people sometimes say, if you want to be a good leader, you must walk amongst your subjects.
There's a lot more to do here than build factories, apartments and roads, of course. Your citizens need to be entertained to be happy, so you'll need parks, sporting arenas, landmarks, and so on. Luckily, the big issues don't present themselves until later on, so you'll have time to get comfortable with the basics. You also have advisors helping you out somewhat, but the tough decisions are still yours to make. Remember, you're on a budget, and that budget can be ridiculously difficult to maintain. Will building a stadium bring in enough money, or will the expenses cause you to neglect another area of town, thereby increasing the crime rate and driving many of your citizens away. If you'd rather not see this happen, well...kill them. Now, it frightens me to consider how many mayors and governors wish they had this ability. If things aren't going well or there's an area of town that needs a complete overhaul, why bulldoze it when you can rain down meteors, tornados, volcanos or giant robots, among others. I can only imagine how many mayors would've prefer the giant robots over bulldozers and wrecking balls since giant robots don't tend to draw protestors when that historic theater is standing over a perfectly good parking lot. Surprisingly, though, I wasn't so big on destroying my cities. Unlike with the Girder and Panel Play Set, the fun in Sim City 4 isn't in building the cities, it's in watching them function after they've been set up. Only when things were going really badly could I bring myself to utilize my weapons of mass destruction.
Musically, Sim City 4 stands at about the same point as all Electronic Arts games, which is two or three fiery demons shy of pure evil. I don't know who are creating the music at Electronic Arts, but I know they must've studied under Satan himself...or Dave Matthews, since no one has been able to prove to me they're not the same person. You can use your own music collection for the soundtrack, but I preferred to just shut the music off. The ambient sounds, you see, were all done quite well. At times calming, at other times alarming, they did a good job of controlling the mood of the game. There are a thousand little things in Sim City 4 that keep it interesting for a while, some of which require you to be in the right place at the right time to see. It's a big game with plenty to see and do, so it doesn't get old very quickly. If it starts to, you can always just build another town and run it another way. But, having said that, I'll still argue that this is not a game. There's a start, but no real end. There's no defined goal and no set reward. It's an experiment, not entirely unlike raising sea monkeys, except that your citizens don't eat each other if you don't feed them. At its most basic, Sim City 4 is simply about creating a little world, changing the environment, seeing what it affects, then reacting appropriately. I'll argue that the game could be improved by adding two additional modes: A scenario mode in which certain goals have to completed in a set amount of time, and a "free build" mode in which you have no budget limits and can just build to your heart's content. If you've never played a Sim City game before, now's a good time to give it a try. And although there's nothing really ground breaking here, fans of the series won't be disappointed. On the other hand, if you've never been able to get into these sim games, Sim City 4 won't change that. You either like this stuff or you don't. It's just too bad Gray Davis didn't play this before becoming governor of California. I'm sure he could go for one of those giant robots right about now.  [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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Anyway, now that we've got all of that cleared up, Sim City 4. No doubt, by now, you know how this works. You're given a budget and the tools required to build your own Metropolis, and you build it. The premise couldn't be more simple, but the game itself sure could. Along the way, you'll be faced with everything from fires to the maffia to budget crunches to attacks from giant robots...some of which you'll purposely unleash on yourself. Why? Because what's the point of building and running a city if you can't destroy it with giant robots?
Along with the mayor tutorial that gets you started on building a city, there's also a topography tutorial that teaches you how to develop the land, more or less. Add canyons, mountains, rivers...the choices are quite vast. Once you've formed the land, you can place trees and wildlife. I understand this is all new to Sim City games, and seasoned players may like this new angle. Me? I couldn't get into it. The map presented at the beginning of the game already offered enough variety for building cities, so adding my own hills seemed kind of pointless.
And oh yeah, your subjects. Sim City 4 allows you to follow individual citizens about their day. Doing so can reveal plenty about the state of the city and the happiness of those living in it. These sims will even offer up advice and daily tidbits from time to time, making the game a bit more personal. Better yet, you can actually import your characters from The Sims if you so desire, but the relationship between the two games stops there. What your characters do in Sim City 4 in no way affects gameplay in The Sims.
Graphically, Sim City 4 looks pretty good, but not good enough to justify the system requirements. Buildings and landscapes take a moment to redraw when scrolling, which can be disconcerting at times. Also, depending upon the amount of activity, the game can slow down quite a bit. The disasters are especially troublesome...it's hard to enjoy a good tornado when the frame rates are so low.