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Availability:
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Arrives
Jun 26 – Jul 1
Platform For Display: PC
Features
- Constructible Worlds - Creative and customizable world that offers unique gameplay benefits, all with a fun tactile interface
- Sims Matter - The Sims in your city speak to you directly and it's up to you to respond to their needs. Will you listen and be the toast of the town? Or abuse your power for fame and fortune?
- Multiplayer - Build a region with friends for the first time! Collaborate or compete in regional and global challenges and make decisions that impact the greater SimCity World
- GlassBox Engine - SimCity introduces GlassBox, the revolutionary simulation technology that gives you the power to impact individual Sims lives, manage city level simulation, and balance multiple city simulations at once
Description
The defining city simulation is back! Create the city you desire and make the choices that shape your city and power the Sims within it. Every decision, big or small, has real consequences. Invest in heavy industry and your economy will soar - but at the expense of your Sims' health as pollution spreads. Implement green technology and improve your Sims’ lives while risking higher taxes and unemployment. Team up with your friends to solve global challenges: launch a space shuttle, reduce carbon emissions, or build magnificent wonders. Compete on global and regional leaderboards to be the richest, the dirtiest, the happiest or the best place to visit!
Release date: March 5, 2013
Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.31 x 4.56 inches; 4 ounces
Type of item: Video Game
Item model number: 19714
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer: No
Item Weight: 4 ounces
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
Date First Available: March 6, 2012
Frequently asked questions
If you place your order now, the estimated arrival date for this product is:
Jun 26 – Jul 1
Yes, absolutely! You may return this product for a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.
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View our full returns policy here.
To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.
View our full returns policy here.
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Top Amazon Reviews
Platform For Display: PC
Easily the worst way to spend $60 since your "Jello of the Month" membership. Wow... So as you no doubt know by now this new release of SimCity has the following major differences from previous versions: 1) You must have a constant internet connection to play. You cannot play without an internet connection- that means no playing on long plane rides or anywhere else you aren't plugged in- usually the best times TO play SimCities of the past. 2) The maps are TINY compared to SimCities of the past, especially SimCity 4. There just isn't room to put all the cool stuff. 3) Although there are grids, roads don't stick to them by default. While some may feel the grid was limiting it had the benefit of keeping straight lines straight, and streets parallel. The SC4 version was far superior to this free form roads in the new version. You can easily put down an expensive mistake that ruins the layout of the city. 4) No "Undo" option. With the chance of city crippling mistakes a bad mouse-click away a basic "Undo last change" or "Go back 1 day" feature was a no brainer. Unfortunately it doesn't exist in this game. You double click instead of single click and you could be dropping a power-plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood. No way to revert to an earlier saved version (because you can't save the city yourself) and now you either have to destroy an expensive power-plant or re-design the city around it to make it work. This doesn't happen in "real" cities so simulation fail. 5) Buildings become "married" to roads. I tried to delete a road to give more room for my Casino to expand and I was warned (thankfully) that bull-dozing that road would also bull-doze the casino itself. 6) Requires far more graphic processing for more basic graphics than SimCity 4. On my current laptop (HP Envy Windows 7, Core i5) I can run SimCity 4 in high/top graphic mode. In the new SimCity almost all graphics were set to "Low" and shadows off completely. The buildings look terrible with these settings. I manually upped the quality and while it did have an affect on framerate it would have been unplayable with the default graphics. The one effect I wanted to get rid of (fog) is not an option to shut off, but it is an option in SimCity 4. Why waste graphics processing power on fog to purposely obstruct the city view is beyond me. SimCity of prior versions worked well with their angle-view, making everything in this SimCity a fully 3D rendered object was a mistake from the start IMO. 7) No more real "zones" like you are used to. In SimCity 4 their zoning was good, you could see how much space a zone takes up, the way it would be pointed, and it would auto-create basic streets within the zone if you wanted. This version does away with all that in favor of just drawing lines along roads to designate R, C, or I. No idea how far back the development will go, very annoying. 8) Abandoned buildings don't ever get fixed up. For some dumb reason you need to be on a constant look-out for abandoned property and bull-doze them or nothing will ever come back again. In real cities private development does buy and demolish abandoned building to put up new ones if demand is high. 9) You try to play and there is no space available- they put you IN LINE to wait to play. They tell you the game will start in "30 minutes." REALLY? I have to wait 30 minutes to play the game I just paid $60 for? I might not want to play in 30 minutes- I want to play the game when I turn it on, that is the point of buying a game! OK, there are some positives but they are drowned out by the fact you can't play when their servers are down which means sometime in the next few years when they abandon this flop you're out your $60 with an unworkable product. Pros- 1) Nice not to have to worry about water pipes- That was annoying in SC4. In this SimCity Water and Electric is automatically a part of the roads you put down- so if a zone connects to a road, it has water (assuming you pump some) 2) Free to "Zone" areas. In a real city it doesn't really cost money to just declare some land Residential or Industrial so glad to see this. (Although you now only start with $50,000, down from $500,000 (on easy) in SC4. 3) It seems easier to get a basic city going. A small city compared to earlier versions but if you get the basics (power, water, and keep pollution away from the residents) you will have a profitable city. As long as the city is profitable you can build just about anything given enough time. The real challenge is in correctly planning such a small city. So overall I say avoid this title like the plague. No doubt it was Maxis/EA management that destroyed this game- they are the ones who required this "always on" internet connection, in hind site this was just a money grab to pull some money out of the SimCity name, they knew there would be thousands of people like me willing to jump into anything with the SimCity name we would throw away $60 no matter what they delivered- and they took full advantage of that. If you're reading this don't make my mistake. Go back to SimCity 4, I re-installed my old copy- it works just fine on Windows 7 64 bit you just have to install it in the c:\program files\ directory NOT the c:\program files(x86)\ that is the default.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2013 by BirdOPrey5
Platform For Display: PC
This is a great game. Most all of the 1 star comments are referring to either 1) the server problems in the first two days after the release, or 2) the fact that it is online only. 1) They have done a great job expanding the servers, and there are no server problems anymore. They now have 24 servers, after only starting with 6 and everything is running smoothly. 2) As for the online only component, it is clearly stated as such before you buy it, so anyone that knows that it would be a big problem shouldn't get the game. It is actually a net positive for me, since you don't have to worry about saving (how many countless times have you lost hours of work because you forgot to save and your computer froze?), and the multiplayer aspect works well and has allowed me to play with my siblings, which is very cool. As for the DRM aspect of it being online only- for those saying it doesn't make a difference, and it would have been so easy to have an offline option: I literally can't remember the last time I paid for a stand-alone game. I know that this aspect must have forced countless others just like me to pay for the game, and to that end, the DRM did it's job. Now for the actual review Gameplay: If you need to get to sleep at reasonable hours, don't play this game! Seriously though, it is totally addicting, and once you start getting into a city, you really can't stop. I screwed myself over a few nights ago because I stayed up playing this till 9 AM. I'm going to have to learn how to ration myself. The gameplay is what makes this game so great. Everything is streamlined and operates in a logical progression, starting you off with easy problems, then expanding once you get farther in the game. There's a big emphasis on roads, as they contain the electric, water, and sewage, and the zones are placed via the roads. The amazing GlassBox engine that runs the game creates an unparalleled amount of realism (every sim, utility, and unit of industrial production is physically represented as an agent in the game; so when it says the population is 131,572, there are actually that many sims walking, driving, living and working in the city). This is exactly what I've wanted post SimCity 4, and I really can't imagine anything less now- it would seem totally fake and unsatisfying. So far I've really only scratched the surface of the game's depth. One of my favorite aspects so far is the ability to make money through the city specializations, so that your budget can be balanced even if the hourly budget (the +'s and -'s) is in the red. In my first city I started making tons of money by making and selling processors. As for region play, it is heavily integrated into the gameplay, as the cities surrounding yours have a direct affect. And with the online component you can cooperate with random people, or invite your friends to play with. I've also just began to explore the possibilities of inter city relationships, but so far it is perfect. The cons of the gameplay are small city sizes and region layouts/inability to edit them. Both of those seem to be connected to the fact that the makers of the game placed an emphasis on the Leaderboards, which require everything to be standardized. Really, I don't think the majority of people are going to care about the Leaderboards since it will probably just consist of a handful of people who totally dominate. All the city tiles are the same size, probably just a bit bigger than the smallest city size in SC4. It's big enough to do a lot, but you're pretty much guaranteed to fill up the whole tile, making space a premium once you get farther in the city. This means that you can't do everything in one city (what I tried to do with my first city), and you're forced to use multiple cities to fulfill different roles. As for the region layouts, although the biggest regions contain 16 cities, they are still only connected by road 4 cities at a time. Those 4-city groups are then connected to each other through rail or water. You can't edit anything outside of the city, so you can't expand or change any of those road networks. This limits the potential level of integration, and again, it's mainly a consequence of the Leaderboard/standardization emphasis. Of course, these cons are not major, and I'm definitely willing to play within those parameters at this point. Graphics: Overall, I love the visuals of the game. Having said that the graphics are sort of cartoonish, as opposed to being realistic. As an analogy I'd say they are more like the neighborhood view of the Sims 3, as opposed to the graphics in Cities XL. I personally prefer a more realistic style, but I can still appreciate the look of the game. They said they wanted it to be more like a 'model' type of look, and they definitely succeeded for what they were going for- everything is very streamlined and crisp. Occasionally there will be a glitch with the scenery overlapping the roads or something, but I'm assuming they fix that in a later patch. The scrolling and rotating works great, and I like the focus blurring feature. The performance of the game is very efficient and I have never lagged (I have a decent computer, a couple years old, on full settings, and I've never lagged). My main disappointment with the graphics so far is that the size of the buildings compared to the size of the landmarks (Empire States Building, Willis Tower) is not even close to being to scale. Those landmarks are about 1/2 or 1/3 as big as they should be just by counting the floors with the windows (those buildings only have maybe 50 floors). That also means that the amount and height of the tall buildings that will pop up is very limited. Also, when you zoom in all the way, the cars are still sort of blurry. It looks fine when they're moving but if they're stopped or you're following them when zoomed in it still looks fuzzy. They probably didn't want to have to redraw them, which makes since for performance. Audio: I love the audio in this game. The music is not quite as energetic as SC4, but it has the same kind of minimalist sentiment. The music also automatically morphs when you do certain things, which is a very cool feature. The sound effects are also pretty spectacular, with sound effects for every action, and ambient sounds depending on where you are. Clicking on different buildings brings a different background sound, which is very effective at establishing a setting. The audio is one of the game's best aspects, and I think it appropriately immerses you into your city's setting that much more.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2013 by jpq21
Platform For Display: PC
I have been looking forward to this game for more than a year now, and spent extra on shipping so that I could get it on the release day. That was more than 2 full days ago. Rather than being able to play this long anticipated game... here are some of the lowlights I've had to endure instead: - Day 1: a day zero patch, before the game finished installing. - upon first running the game, further patching - once finally in the game, North American servers full... placed in 30 minute waiting queue - tried "Oceanic" servers, and was able to connect... but once "in" the game... unable to create new city, so couldn't play. - tried various servers, none of the ones that were open and available would let me create a city or play. Gave up for the night. - Day 2: More patches when trying to run the game. Finally able to connect to North American server, and create city, but game locked up during tutorial, and had to use Task Manager to quit the game. - around 10pm, finally able to actually run the game. Ran for about about 10 minutes before SimCity server dropped me, and kicked me back to the main menu. Unable to open my city again after more than an hour of trying. Gave up for the night. - Day 3: tried to play mid-day, and could get onto server, and open previously played city. All progress was lost, so had to start over. Was able to play for about 30 minutes this time before server dropped me again. Unable to open saved city. - restarted SimCity, more patching. However when patch completed, and I clicked on the button to restart the game... game would not open. I used task manager, and could see SimCity.exe running, but nothing open on screen. Forced closed, and tried again. Same thing. Rebooted, tried again... same thing. Gave up, and uninstalled SimCity. - reinstalled SimCity. With extremely slow download servers, and 2 additional patches, install took about 90 minutes. I was able to open the game, but servers were once again unavailable. - tried again in the evening, and was able to open game, and open my saved city. I estimate about 20 minutes worth my 30 minutes of play-time had not been saved. Rebuilt. - played for about an hour, when screen went black, and kicked back to the main game screen (typical of when SimCity server drops me). Was able to immediately reopen saved city... only to find ALL of my previous hours worth of building progress, was once again erased. With no way to "force" a savegame and manually restore... had to start over yet again. So that brings me up to current. Quick question for you: would you actually pay $60 for this hot, steaming pile of crap... along with the associated frustration? The really sad thing is, when I'm able to actually play, it is a really amazing game. EA has taken a AAA, flagship product, and destroyed it by forcing users to play online. One simple fix for this, and all their bad PR and horrible customer experiences would go away: release a patch to allow users to play offline. It truly is that simple. If EA does not do this, the hacker/mod community ABSOLUTELY will. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who will ABSOLUTELY be using that patch when it becomes available. EA has to make a choice here. They can antagonize their hardcore fans and alienate any new fans by continuing to force online-only play... or they can actually respond in a positive way to such an obviously flawed decision, and release an offline-play patch themselves. One way or another, SimCity players ARE going to patch around such an obtrusive and inconvenient burden. EA can put their (idiotic) business model first, and force those who use a 3rd party patch, to play a back and forth game of updating SimCity to break such a patch... to which the mod community would release a new patch... that EA would break again, over and over. Or, EA can actually put their customers first, do the right thing and allow offline-play. This would actually add value to their users, as it would let them play anywhere, any time they chose. Including places without a persistent internet connection, like flying in an airliner for instance. No matter how fantastic their game is, I would not, and will not recommend the game until I can play it how I want, when I want: single player, offline. The day EA releases the Offline-play patch, they will get the 4 or 5 star rating that the GAME deserves. Until then, with all the headache and heartache that EA has created by their greed and stupidity... THEY get 1 star.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2013 by Patrick McKinley
Platform For Display: PC
*Congrats whiners and crybabies; it looks like the game is dead. While the servers are up; there has been no new announcements since offline mode (the whiners and crybabies are still whining and crying); no updates, no new DLC, no expansions.* It took several expansion packs to make Civilization 5 great. While the launch of SimCity was horrible, the servers have been better since. When I read about the issues in March, I waited about a week or two to go on. It was spotty at best but, after about a month, there were no issues connecting for me at all. Do I think the launch sucked? Yes. If anyone remembers way back when Ultima Online was available there were a million problems. It happens. Yes, at times I might get kicked off while playing but it usually happens once a month. Never in the afternoon but usually late at night. Do I think refunds were in order; absolutely not. The whiners and crybabies; Yes. Now, I'm not saying every 1-2 star reviews are the whiners and crybabies because I don't think this game was perfect. I'd say that the ones who didn't "buy from Amazon," are pretty much the whiners stepping on their soapbox. Concerning the DRM: It's a matter of opinion. I personally don't care that I have to be online to play SimCity. Many years ago, this would be a travesty but most people have connections that are on 24/7. I can sympathize though with people who either don't have a constant internet connection or live in a area with a slow connection. Not everyone has a Fiber Optic connection. My sympathy stops when you know full well that this game requires a internet connection to play, yet you still buy the game. The graphics are pretty good. While the "Sims" seem more like stick figures, the buildings look especially nice. The skyscrapers look pretty. Not amazing, but pretty. The streets look nice as well however, sometimes there is a glitch when you place roads, it will sometimes place a intersection that doesn't belong or show a pathway right into a home. I wish that the traffic lights could of been more realistic but I really like how in this SimCity, the driving Sims really pay attention to the traffic lights although pedestrians don't which looks unrealistic. Also, the city looks alive with your citizens going about there business. For example, a homeowner within your city drives to the Garbage Dump, reports to work and is driving a garbage truck to pick up the days garbage. I love how the trucks go to each and every zone to pick up the trash. The simulation does a fine job letting you know whether you need to plop more buildings to add more garbage trucks. The idea of ploppables is fantastic! In all honesty, I don't miss the terraforming and region creation tools from SimCity 4. Yes, I believe in this SimCity that there should be more of a variety of regions. Right now there are only a handful that allows you to have up to 16 cities and several "Great Works." Great Works act as huge bonuses to your region. For example, if your region cooperates and builds a International Airport, citizens from your whole region, even if they aren't connected to all 16 cities, can visit any city within the region. You also can get a huge influx of tourists. If you built a city catering to tourists, then this means more money in your coffers. Some cities have rivers running through it, some cities have a ocean bordering it. While this does help your sims in the way of commuting to other cites, tourists visiting, and relieve traffic, this does take away valuable real estate to build on a already midsized map. Still, some variety on the actual plot of land you chose to build your city is needed. Concerning city size maps, yes, I do believe they are not large. Gone are they days where in SimCity 4 you can create a city with millions. While it's possible to create a city with 1 million people, all cities will look the same cramming people within city block after city block. In my honest opinion, if I created a city with millions in SimCity 4, the city seemed to have no heart and no specialization. Yes, I could add a mall, prison, missile silo, and a toxic waste dump but the simulation was not realistic. While at times I will think, "hey, a bigger map would be nice," but thinking about it, Id rather be able to specialize my city than them all looking the same. Playing SC4; the cities and region looked the same. You could put everything down and not have to worry about the budget. The one thing I do miss from SC4 was creating a giant region. It would of been nice if the regions in SimCity allowed for more cities. The cap is 16 so far. Concerning multiplayer, Cities XL failed but with SimCity, it's pretty nice. If someone needed money or municipal help, help was on the way. In Cities XL, you had to pay $9.99 for the multiplayer aspect, but on SimCity, it's free. Communicating and trading is much easier on SimCity than CXL. Just remember that the multiplayer aspect on CXL was shutdown years ago. Focus Home Entertaining who bought CXL from Monte Cristo hasn't done much with the several additions to CXL. The most was the ability to mod. Those that want to complain about Maxis/EA should look at Focus Home Entertainment. They re-released CXL as CXL '11 with adding a good amount from CXL '09 (Monte Cristo) but the same old bugs that plagued CXL '09 were carried over. The game once again became unplayable if you had several hundred thousand citizens. Subsequent releases of CXL just added some buildings but again, the same bugs carried over. How can you justify a $29-39 game adding maybe 100 buildings each year but the same old bugs infest it. FHE takes forever to answer you if you have a problem and yet again, CXL Platinum is pretty much the same as the other CXL iterations. Going back to SimCity, now you can specialize your city. You can craft a mining town, a resort catering to tourists, a technological center that creates flat panel TV's and CPUs, and a cultural mecca that includes stadiums, arenas, and a amusement park (DLC). Your decisions affect who comes to your city whether it's tourists or other workers from other cities within your region. This can also create traffic nightmares. You have several traffic solutions to work with although I was slightly upset that if I create a huge city, I couldn't create a subway. With the city land size not great, at least give me the option of creating subway lines. The one thing that CXL excelled at, the ability to create "lines." For example, bus lines and subway lines. You can't create bus lines in SimCity but you have the option to place Bus Terminals, a shuttle depot and/or a bus depot. If your Bus Terminal has a long wait time, you can add more buses to your terminal in the form of ploppables which is a great idea. The idea of Ploppables allows you to add to a building instead of building more and more of the same type. For example, if you build a Coal Power Station and you find that you need more power, instead of building another Coal Power Plant, you have several options to add to your power plant. In SimCity 4, it wasn't uncommon to have a dozen coal power plants in your city which was a pollution nightmare. In this SimCity, besides pollution, you have to take into account which way the wind is blowing plus you can add clean burning coal furnace ploppable if you have the necessary "research," from a university within your region. The simulation is very nice. When your garbage trucks drive around in SimCity 4, all they do is drive around. In SimCity,they will drive around to all zones, stop, pick up the trash, and move to the next zone. The simulator does a really good job showing you different charts/graphs from garbage, coal deposits, happy Sims, crime, pollution etc. How the zones "communicate" with each other is great. Your sims will look for work. They will mostly look for work within your industrial zones as well as commercial. The amount of workers varies for each zone type (C/I). Even your trade depot which sends out trucks to your industrial zones and mining complexes to bring back to the trade depot to ship out your freight from your industry and sell or buy your ore, coal, and/or oil. Within your industrial complex at your trade depot, you can buy/sell alloy to create TVs and CPUs to sell for a lot of dough! Many have opinions but personally I don't mind about the always on component of the game. My internet is on 24/7 and rarely does Verizon cause a hiccup. If the server is down or if my internet is down, then I'll just simply play another game. Will I get annoyed? Of course but hey, I got other games. Origin which is where this game is located (like Steam) I find is not as good as Steam but I've never had any hiccups with Origin. I've never had that issue and I will go on SimCity any time during the day and/or night. I usually encounter the "server not responding" when I'm playing at night but it has been a very long time since I got that error message. The last 2 times I was thrown out of my city was because Verizon was shooting updates. It happened late last night; I called Verizon and they said that there was a update that was sent. When my internet was back, I found that my city was still there, saved, and had everything I did that day for the few hours I was on. While I didn't exit SimCity and see it sync and save, it still showed everything was there. Yes, it seems that SimCity is adding DLC to pay for but who hasn't been doing this. Tropico 4 just added more content that you need to pay for. Look at Train Simulator 2013, it has over $1000 worth of DLC. I hope SimCity does get expansion packs. SimCity 4 was great with the addition of the Rush Hour expansion pack. Yes, Do I hope SimCity's maps get bigger? Yes. I do find SimCity enjoyable. Not quite up there with SC4 but I would rate it higher than CXL at this point. For those that will bug out with my 4 star rating, get over it. I happen to enjoy SimCity. Feel free to argue your points in the comments but at least keep it civil. My opinion, I don't need comments telling me to go f- myself just because it's my opinion. Show some class. Concerning the DLC (downloaded content) of European City packs; what's the big deal? Personally, Im glad it wasn't included within the limited version since I wouldn't even use it. This was why I changed my order to the Limited version. For those that wanted it, they had the other edition that was $70. Those that complained about paying $70, then you should of gotten the Limited Edition. Having available as DLC just means that if you change your mind, buy what you want. Same thing with the new Amusement Park DLC. If you don't like it or question EA concerning it; again, don't buy it, it's your choice. Spamming us with DLC is nothing new. A majority of games other than SimCity have been (and still are) doing it. Buy what you want; pass on what you don't want. It's funny because then you get the whiners who say," I don't want this crap in my game." People really need to stop whining about "bigger maps, it's SimTown, the server issues, why did I buy this, I wasted $70." I know growing up is hard to do as accepting the fact that there are people that actually enjoy the game. While the game is not perfect, it's much better than what it was at release time. + FREE multiplayer + Nice fresh graphics that really update the SimCity series + The simulation is very nice (If you build a hotel and gambling casino for tourists, by placing commercial zones nearby, you'll see motels/hotels and shopping pop up and tourists will go there + Glassbox Engine looks good + Specialized cities + The bus stops plop ON the road like it should unlike SC4 that took valuable real estate (2 tiles) + YOU HAVE TO THINK AND PLAN AHEAD; put into thought what you want since the saving option was taken away - Maps aren't very big - Highway placing (parkways) taken away...in other words, we have no control and/or placement of limited access highways. Which is a bummer, I miss toll plazas :) - Wish we had more hotels and casinos or resorts to place in our tourist specialized city - The road placement tool is a little awkward - Server illness sometimes happens (it throws you off) but honestly, since I've had SimCity (since day 1) I've only been thrown off 4 times and that's mostly since June. - Origin (I find Steam slightly more reliable BUT when Steam has those 75% sales, you will be happy that SimCity is on Origin. - Not enough region variety - The city sites in the region look the same for each "resource type" - The pathfinding for the firetrucks/police vehicles/ ambulance is baffling which was fixed in a patch ***By the way, the Prima Guide is very informative. You can also get it online and it will update according to the game**** *** The embellishment of constant server bugs is more from people who jump on the anti-EA/Maxis train and follow others.*** -I haven't been thrown off SImCity or find a city I was working on empty in quite a long time. *Seems like you add a little bit of strategy and most go nuts because they can't think before they plop anything down. Also, instead of going apes*** on the first few weeks of launch perhaps giving it some time for some minor corrections could of been warranted. These same 1-star reviewers I bet would still go apesh** if this SimCity was more of a updated SimCity 4.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2013 by Mike
Platform For Display: PC
Hello Everyone. I wanted to give my two cents on this great game. The new Simcity has one drawback and so many benefits in my opinion. The first and only drawback, which is not substantial considering the product, is that you have to be connected to the internet constantly, which in the first few days of the games release, was a tedious task. I, however, cannot complain as it took me about 5 minutes of trying to connect before I was successful on the North America server. After this first few minutes, it has not been a problem. Sure every once in a while it has trouble connecting but overall not really a problem. Now onto the positive. I want to begin with the game itself. The graphics are fantastic. It looks great on my asus laptop running an hd display. Everything is clear and easy to navigate and I can classify my display via the options menu to my widescreen. Additionally, the ability to upgrade or add-on to buildings in something missing from a lot of games. Sure you can upgrade some of your soldiers or whatever in games like Rise of Nations/Rise of Legends, but nothing modifies the building itself. Now you can add wings to your hospital, add carparks for your police and fire stations, and increase the power output of your power plants. I do agree that the individual maps are a bit smaller than in previous installations of this franchise, but I don't see it as a bad thing. Yes, you can only expand so far before you need to start on a new city, but that is the majority of the fun here. I can focus one city on commercial, one on industrial, etc. and then link the cities and have them provide for each other. I think it is hilarious that they added the heroes and villains pack to this game with such an increase in comic book hero popularity over the past few years. It makes the game fun and adds challenges to the game. I have yet to build my Dr. Vu tower but it's coming... Additionally, I have never really played a game that I can install on more than one machine, and pick up where I left off on any of the machines, whenever I want. Sure, you could install previous installations on more than one machine and then transfer your existing game from laptop to pc, etc and pick up where you were, but now I can finish the game on my laptop when I am on my lunch break at work, and continue on my PC when I get home. There is no transferring, no delays, just start up the game and go. Its terrific. And I can play on as many machines as I want there is NO LIMIT. Now on to how long you can play the game. If you can absorb how advanced the next installment of this franchise will be, then why focus all of your attention on how long EA keeps the servers on for this particular game? It took them more than a decade to release a follow up to Simcity 4 and all of the downloads/updates, etc. are still listed on the EA site for download (last I checked as I still play Simcity 4). If you consider that time frame, 10 years, into this game, the add-ons, expansions, etc that are going to come out for this game are well going to extend the server life for this title. You can expect the servers for this to be online for at least 15 years (that's my estimation). Given the different options available in this game, I can easily see myself playing this game for that long (maybe not for hours on end such as I am now but I will still boot up the laptop or pc for some city building every now and then). So to sum up, the always on internet deal is a bit tedious and can be frustrating if it takes an extended period of time, but this is where PC games are going. Piracy is at an all time high do to the rising prices of internet and the global recession going on, so its to be expected that securities be put in place. I'm sure someone will come up with a crack or something in the future, or EA may just break down and give the option to play offline with certain stipulations, such as logging in to verify you are who you are and to make sure that only one machine is logged in at a time and then you can log off but that is something we will just have to wait and see. I'm sure this review will get backlash, but I wanted to give a positive review of a game that is really terrific, but isn't making the best impression in its first few days of release. Thanks for reading!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2013 by B. Love
Platform For Display: PC
I did a lot of reading and researching about this new SimCity iteration and read a lot of animosity rising up from fans about permanent online and smaller map sizes. I actually refused to pre-order this game for these reasons and thought EA had set out to destroy a franchise I have loved since the 90's. Well, my love for SimCity was too much so I went ahead and pre-ordered anyway, hoping that the aforementioned issues wouldn't be too bad and I might actually ignore the restrictions EA has made on this game. Let me tell you about my experience: I anxiously got home from work last night and plopped my disc in my drive and loaded the game. Install went smoothly, updates downloaded just fine, and I load up the game to start the tutorial. I breezed through the tutorial in 30 minutes and started to feel myself grow excited with all the things you can do. The game told me it's now time to create a city of my own and I selected a region to play. I got about two hours into building my city and the game prompted me to expand to other areas in the region, so I figured I'd get another city going as well. Only when I did my game froze and I had to force quit. When I logged back on I had to redo the tutorial and my saved progress was gone. I assume they updated the servers and just accepted that I had to restart since they were still working on the kinks. I was able to play for another three hours just fine, then my game hung up again and I had to force quit. Only this time it put me in a queue for that server since it was "busy." I thought this would happen so I just opted to play on another server that was available, only I found out that your saved game progress is SERVER SPECIFIC. That means if the server you selected to play on initially ever goes down or is encountering high volumes of players, you either have to wait or start a new game on a different server. So, this brings me to why this game is such a setback for the series. This isn't an anti-DRM review at all. In fact, the way EA handled DRM is not a bad method compared to limiting installs. They allow your game to be tied to your Origin account so you can reinstall the game many times without ever needing the disc. The issue is the fact that you have to play on SERVERS as opposed to always being logged into Origin. If they made it where you have to be logged into Origin to access the game, there would be no issues. Origin itself is just like Steam and it can run in the background without impeding your progress. But forcing gamers to play on dedicated servers for a game that has historically been a single-player game is just asking for problems and we're already encountering it. In fact, EA has even said that they purposely created wait rooms for servers and if we have to wait we can just start fresh on another server. They are literally telling us that it's no big deal for us to lose HOURS of hard work just because their servers can't handle the workload. That means if you spend 30 hours building a region on one server and that server goes down or starts experiencing long wait times you can't continue your game. At all. I can get past permanent online with Origin, but EA's servers aren't sophisticated or stable enough to warrant permanent online play. And the city size restrictions are hard to get past. The area you have to build in is actually quite small. There is no god mode so you can't create your own regions, either. It really feels confined and suffocating and takes away from the "spend hundreds of hours building a huge metropolis" feeling because now you can fill a map in only a couple hours. I gave the gameplay three stars, though, because the building add-ons are really cool and allow you to build large police stations from small precincts simply by purchasing add-ons, like more police cars. So you're not having to build a police station every couple blocks just to increase coverage. I also like how everything is streamlined through roads. Zoning is simplified and all you do is paint around the edges of a block of road a specific zone and the density type of the road determines the density of the buildings that rise up. So if you build a low density street you'll only see single family homes. If you build a high density road you'll start to see apartments move in. Same with water and electricity. If a road connects a power station or water tower to another area, that area will receive power and water. There are no more pipes or power lines to lay out which frees up more cash to worry about other things. This also allows you to lay out roads however you like and paint zones around them letting the game dictate how the buildings will build up around them. So many times playing SimCity 4 I would have to find the right combination of shift+ctrl+click or shift+alt+click or shift+click just to get the right zoning layout to show. All in all, the game has a lot of potential and could be a lot of fun but tying your saved games to their online servers means that you either have to wait to resume past games on busy servers, or keep restarting on other servers. This is uncalled for, especially when the majority of us didn't ask for online play. If they give us our saves to be able to play locally and if they patch in a god/terraforming mode in the future, this game would be 4 stars. If they give us completely editable regions a la SimCity 4 with much larger city sizes, this game would be a 5. Simple as that.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2013 by Dustin B
Platform For Display: PC
TL;DR -- Mediocre game. Now that the game isn't a mess of connection and crash problems that should have been solved in the alpha build I'm going to re-write this review. I should preface this by acknowledging that I've been playing Simcity games since the early nineties. I love Simcity and may be being overly hard on this game. That said, this game feel like it's about half Simcity, a quarter Anno 2070, and a quarter Caesar IV. Each of those games has good things about them that outweigh the bad (except maybe Caesar IV) and I liked each of them in their own way. I'm not sure if I like Simcity 2013. It has a lot of very odd design decisions going on. For example: While Anno 2070 had the tension between needing to pollute and needing to build to defend yourself, Simcity has no particular reason to pollute. Every source of pollution has a mitigating and/or negating technology that isn't especially hard to access. Water pollution problem? Build a treatment plant. Where in the real world there's an incentive to pollute (cost), the Simcity counter-pollution measures are almost universally more cost effective than their polluting counterparts. The only exceptions are the carbon-based power plants in early game -- As long as you can produce your own oil/coal, they may be more cost-effective than green or atomic power solutions. The second you have to start importing fuel is the second you wished you had started out green. Even if you're a jerk, like me, who likes creating horrible conditions just to see what happens -- there's no particular reason to. Apart from getting people sick and maybe starting fires, nothing interesting happens. Resource limits, something I've been wishing for since forever, has been introduced. I now know why it wasn't included in another Simcity game. IT. IS. A. BAD. IDEA. The aquifer (or "watertable" as the unwashed who wrote this game call it) is the perfect example. The aquifer supplies your pumps and watertowers with water. I don't know why rivers don't work for that but they don't. Your citizens are hoity-toits who can only drink sparkling fresh dwarf pee I guess. Anyway, the aquifer is depleted by being utilized. Makes sense, yes? The aquifer is also replenished by rain. Also makes sense, yes? Here's the problem -- IT NEVER RAINS. I've seen rain three times in ten hours of play. That those three times were all at the same day when it was snowing outside makes me believe that the Simcity designers copied Black & White's "GAME WEATHER IMITATES YOUR REAL WORLD LOCATION WEATHER HURR DURR" mechanic which was universally regarded as a terrible idea at the time. I ended up Googling this phenomenon and discovered that so many people have the same problem that an exploit is viewed as the only reasonable solution. Now look at the more rare resources like coal or "ore". One might think that a reasonable way to refill those would be to smash a giant space rock into your city. Nope. Meteors just destroy things and mining serves no purpose other than unlocking metallurgy buildings and metal imports. This is poor design at its very best. I like that all the utilities' distribution grids were folded into the road network -- That's the way I always did it anyway. The thing that becomes problematic is that this game has a very poor routing AI and utilities are treated like cars. Little electricity zots or water droplets travel along your roads to destinations. Each one seems to individually choose a completely random path and is "consumed" by the first building it encounters that needed it. You'll end up with situations where the game is complaining about backed up pipes or not enough public transportation -- but when you look at the appropriate info mode, you'll find that all your trains (or zots or droplets or whatever) are just circling the same block over and over again for no reason. The worst is when your emergency vehicles fall prey to this behavior and circle a fire for hours while everything burns down. The game is very pretty while you're zoomed out. I'll be generous and say that the weird rendering problems (invisible buildings, certain buildings have rays that shoot off into forever) are probably because of my video card. Zooming in down to street level is something I've always wanted from a Simcity game. Now that I have it I want to send it back. The citizens are ugly. Think of the two-frame fighting game crowds of the nineties and you'll have an idea of what these people look like. Maybe I'm expecting too much but I feel like full 3D wasn't the wisest choice for a Simcity game. I'm constantly sending the game back to an isometric or a topdown view because any other angle obscures too much of what I need to see. The UI design is pretty, but a bit obtuse. I'm constantly hitting wrong buttons trying to find the one category that has what I'm looking for. The infographics modes are all very helpful and pretty enough. My major complaint there is there are no graphs-over-time. It's all in-the-moment data. Sometimes you really want to know if that block really is declining or if you're just remembering wrong (or if nobody can get there because they're all busy circling the block like idiots looking for the perfect parking spot). The music is procedurally generated monotony. I think this game has about 2 distinct songs. I finally turned the music off when I realized I was clicking on buildings to get music I actually wanted to listen to. I don't know how I feel about the multiplayer. I'd been wishing for negative spillovers (pollution and crime affect the entire region) since Simcity 4 -- It's a pain, but it stops people (me) from exploiting city boundaries as a way to keep from having to deal with negative stuff. I'm puzzled by the global market -- It's never clear if it's a meta-game thing (everybody playing contributes regardless of region) or if it's just the world market from Cities XL where you could buy/sell infinite goods because they couldn't figure out what else to do with excess production. I'm also unclear on where all these "commuters" are coming from. My region has a massive deficit of workers (and goods for that matter), yet there's an infinite supply of commuters coming from *somewhere*. I like the idea of the "great works" projects but they seem a little like something that was tacked on in order to make up for the cities being so small. Frankly, apart from the arcology and the space center, they're just too mundane. They remind me of the life-goals from The Sims. Some of them are interesting (or hilarious) while the vast majority are uninspired grinding for something I don't feel is a reward.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2013 by S. Teagardin
Platform For Display: PC
First of all, to all those "1 star" reviewers - sorry to hear that you had to endure the pain of "server unavailable" errors after paying $60 to play this game. I pre-ordered, but the game wasnt delivered until March 8th so ended up skipping all that drama. And boy am I glad I did. The game is fantastic. My 7yr old son and I spent a solid 5-6 hours in front of the PC building our first twin cities. The first city was a disaster and within the first hour, we ran out of almost the entire $1 million "seed" money! We built a nuclear plant and ended up with a huge surplus of power we couldn't use (while the nuclear plant kept using up like $1500/hr or something insane). We decided to issue bonds (I explained what they were to my 7 yr old; what a great way to teach him how government works! sweet!) and raise $300K. With that money, we managed to reverse our fortunes and went from leaking $5000/hr to making $1500/hr, in about 2 hours of gameplay. The simulation is deep. And when you think you have reached the full depth of something (say the transit system), it opens up more options and endless possibilities. We were playing in sandbox mode, and havent even tried the other modes yet. Cant wait! I have played Simcity 3000 and 4 in the past, and something about this 5th version feels way "better" in the way it has been executed. The game feels more real and balanced. Road creation is vastly improved with all kinds of shapes possible. I noticed the game doesn't have the Undo option which was a bit weird. What was weirder was that I didnt miss that at all - I did have a few cases where I felt like it would've helped, but the bulldozer option worked just fine. In some ways, the game felt more "real" without the Undo option. My computer hardware configuration (this is a HTPC in my living room) is as follows: Core i3-2105, 8GB RAM NOTE: I am using the in-built graphics, HD3000 Silverstone Sugo SG06BB HTPC Case I had to keep the graphics mostly at low-medium, and resolution at 1600x900, but the game was quite playable. Scrolling is slow, but not by very much. The game seems to be more CPU dependent than GPU gated. I am thinking about upgrading to a card like the Radeon HD7850 so I can experience all the bells and whistles the game has to offer. And if you are wondering I ran into any Server Issues, the answer is yes. Once after I restarted the game. But another restart later, the game logged me in just fine. I have not run into it since then. I am hopeful EA will keep their servers up and running in good shape so we can forget about the launch fiasco and focus on having fun!
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Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2013 by SatT