Because EA is selling this new SimCity as an online game, we're not quite ready to give you an official score until we've spent some serious time with it after its long-awaited launch tomorrow. But I can tell you right now what I think of the couple of dozen hours I've spent playing on the review version, both by myself and with others: so far what we have here is a gorgeous and incredibly detailed city simulation that occasionally trips over its own staggering complexity.
First off, an unfortunate dealbreaker for thousands of PC gamers: you're going to need a permanent internet connection in order to play SimCity. Even though it doesn't need moment-to-moment updates from Maxis' servers (so lag isn't an issue), it does need to phone home in order to save, even when playing single-player. Maxis insists that requirement isn't simply for DRM purposes, but who're they kidding? Of course it is. Also, EA's Origin client is required and must be installed in order to play. In fairness, it's been pretty well-behaved for me, other than a couple of loading issues that EA promises won't happen with the live version. I'll keep you posted on that.
I know those restrictions are big problems for some of you, and it's a damn shame that they're even something we have to worry about here. Because this SimCity is, in many ways, magnificently ambitious and an enormous improvement over the last real SimCity game from 10 years ago. For example, just watching one of these cities run and knowing that each and every one of its tens or even hundreds of thousands of Sim citizens is individually tracked, and can be followed from home to work or school to the store to parks or shows or other activities and then back home again, is genuinely impressive when you think about it.
What kind of stalker-ish creepy mayor are you?
While they generally number fewer than the denizens of old-school SimCitys, those games are effectively just guessing about which Sims are where using some fuzzy math. This one knows. You can click on one person in a crowd of hundreds on a busy city street, and that person has a name and things that he wants and things that have recently made him happy or angry. It's completely insane. So are they, sometimes, like why my citizens felt the need to protest in front of City Hall when I had an 83% approval rating, or a bus driver fails to enter a school parking lot and shuts down traffic for blocks, but on the whole it's really cool to watch.
On top of the simulation, SimCity is super-dense with rich art and style. It starts with the elegant, mostly intuitive interface, and extends to graphical nuances like sunlight reflecting off solar panels and the unique ambient sounds that play every time you select a building like a police station. The music that accompanies everything is delightful, a cheerily optimistic and industrious tune that shifts enough to avoid becoming monotonous. It all made my first hours after founding a city a constant stream of astonishments at the level of attention Maxis has slathered over every inch of this thing.
Those little Sim people don't look like much – they're little more than colorful digital stick figures even at the closest zoom level – but the cities we can build for them are beautifully diverse. The new curvy roads may be inefficient when it comes to packing in as many people and buildings as possible, but they're a great option for sculpting picturesque layouts when the mood strikes, or when the stubbornly un-editable terrain of the pre-defined maps demands a road go around it. Dozens of different building designs and color schemes sprout up on their own wherever you create residential, commercial, or industrial zones, and you can zoom in close enough to see the green garden hose hooked on the side of a suburban home. Different education and wealth levels all have unique looks, and high-tech buildings in cities with fancy education systems look dramatically different from their low-tech equivalents. Zooming in and flying through a bustling street for some sightseeing definitely hasn't gotten old yet.
Welcome to SimBurbia.
City specializations – a somewhat strange concept of mayor-run businesses – add both further visual differences and some welcome changed-up gameplay. One map I played on had a motherload of oil underneath it, and when I plopped down a field of pumping oil wells and a trade depot to automatically export black gold to the global market, the amount of cash it brought in felt almost like a cheat code. (A more advanced city could refine that crude into even pricier gasoline, but I'm not there yet.) Other specializations, such as casinos and tourism, are about attracting out-of-town Sim tourists – a process that, like several of SimCity's late-game concepts, isn't explained terribly well. You can get by on tax revenue alone if you don't care to bother with that stuff, though.
For all its technical ambition, however, there's one place SimCity really doesn't push hard enough. Maxis says it named this game engine GlassBox because it shows off the inner workings of the simulation machine, but it took on another meaning entirely when, far sooner than I'd expected, an invisible wall prevented me from continuing to expand my city. Just as I felt like my economy was picking up the momentum I'd need to really grow this thing, space to plop down large buildings like community colleges and recycling facilities became hard to come by. The route to further growth is to increase the density of the city, not the area, and that feels a bit constraining. EA says there may be larger maps in the future, but there's no word on when or whether they'll cost extra. To be fair, my biggest 100,000-population city never could manage to slow down my PC, which is running a three-year-old Core i7 and a GeForce GTX 570.
Make sure your nuke plant is operated by educated workers. Or else this happens.
Given the limited city sizes, I appreciate how the second city I built in the same region, Dan Jose, could mooch off the technology and excess resources of my first (Dan Francisco). For example, when I founded Dan Jose I didn't have to build a power plant at all because Dan Francisco had a nuclear reactor, and I could simply buy whatever wasn't being used. The same goes for unlocks – if a City Hall add-on exists in Dan Francisco that allows a hospital to be built, Dan Jose gets all the benefits too (and vice versa). That system both saves precious building space and ensures that starting each new town isn't the same monotonous procedure of putting down exactly the same electricity, water, sewage, trash, police, fire, medical, and education structures every time.
That kind of inter-city cooperation is also the foundational idea of multiplayer, where you can share a region with up to 15 other mayors. It does work, and with lots of coordination it can work well, but in the multiplayer sessions I've played so far it had nearly as many drawbacks as advantages. While it's excellent to be able to ask a friend to build a City Hall upgrade you need but don't have a slot open for, or to send you a shipment of refined alloy so you can get your highly profitable computer chip factory operational, it's a pain when I suddenly find the power or water supply I was relying on has dried up because the player I was buying it from expanded his city without also increasing capacity. It's a problem that's avoidable with enough communication, but this isn't Left 4 Dead – you probably aren't all going to be on voice chat the entire time calling out for second-to-second needs. I won't, anyway.
Maxis wants us to be team players, like these guys.
I'm going to go ahead and predict that, much like Blizzard found with Diablo 3, Maxis will soon discover that the majority of SimCity players will want to play by themselves most of the time. The good news is that it's a totally valid way to play, and no significant options I've seen are closed off to those of us who play in private regions and single-handedly run all the cities therein. Progress is a little slower because you have to switch between cities, but it's definitely doable. It's very much like playing The Sims 2, which allows you to control multiple households, but in order to switch between them you have to go through a loading screen.
Solo players might have a tough time managing a Great Work -- regional projects like a major airport or power plant that benefits all the cities in a region. They're so ambitious that I've yet to even get one off the ground after more than 25 hours played. I'm sure you could build one in that time if you know what you're doing, but so far that's proved too ambitious for me as a new player.
I'll get there soon enough though, because so far SimCity is the kind of game that makes me wish it had a real-world clock displayed on the screen so I know when to stop to eat. When I get engrossed fine-tuning the inner workings of my public transportation system it devours time like nobody's business.
Remember to check back here at IGN for ongoing impressions as the week goes on, and if you want to see it in action on launch day, be sure to watch Greg Miller's epic nine-hour SimCity livestream tomorrow!
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment