SimCity 4 is the latest game in the storied franchise that has been eating up
countless hours of gameplay for over ten years now. While the gameplay
basics are the same - build a large, successful city from scratch while keeping
its treasury in the black - there are a lot of new features in this incarnation
of the game. These new features go a long way towards giving you very fine
control over your city, but at the cost of making a hard game a bit tougher.
Micromanagers will rejoice, but those that just want to watch a city spring to
life will have a hard go of things.
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| There's plenty of room for building new cities. |
One of the biggest changes to come with SimCity 4 is the inclusion of a
regional map. The regional map is a large section of land divided into
numerous areas, each of which can hold a city. The regions are divided
into different sizes, so you can pick one that provides your city with plenty of
room to grow or a smaller one that will put your mayoral skills to the test.
What's more is that these regions do not exist in isolation - you can connect
the regions and build a network of cities. If you connect two cites by
road, your sims can travel between them. This allows you to do things like
building an idyllic suburban city with plenty of recreation while keeping all
the polluting, but job-providing, industry in the city next door. Your
cities can also be connected by more than roads. One city can be connected
to the next by water pipes or power lines, allowing you to sell excess capacity
to thirsty neighbors. You can even haul away another city's garbage.
Once you fill up a regional map with cities you are not out of luck - you can
load new regional maps and begin everything anew. SimCity 4 ships with
some regional maps based on famous locales such as the London and San Francisco
Bay areas. Should you have a favorite region that is not included in the
game, then you can use the game's excellent landscaping tools to create it or to
design your own unique world. You can grow mountains, ridgelines, and
mesas, or sculpt canyons, valleys, and depressions. You can erode your
landscape to give it that weathered look, or unleash disasters to scar the land
before your sims begin to move in. There's nothing like a meteor crater
for giving a city a little character. Once you've finished sculpting the
landscape, you can automatically align its edges with those of its neighbors for
realistic continuity between your city maps. There is one disappointment with the
sculpting tools; there is no water tool. Water is created when you drop the elevation
of land below sea level. There's no way to create mountain lakes, rivers,
or waterfalls - and as a result no way to create hydroelectric plants.
When you decide to build your city the real fun begins. Like in SimCity
games before it, creating a city in SimCity 4 requires you to create zoning for
residential, commercial, and industrial development. Sims will populate
your city based on how appealing a place it is to live and work, which is
accomplished by building infrastructure (roads, water system, power,...),
services (police, fire, medical, ...), and recreational facilities. You
also have quite a bit of control over your city's development through
ordinances, tax rates, and your city's budget. You are given an
initial bankroll, but must soon start generating revenue through taxation while
resisting the temptation to go on a building spree ... and that temptation is
going to be hard to resist.
Not for the faint of heart »
