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25th Jul 2013

Review: Sim City is back, and it’s still ridicuously addictive

With the news that Sim City has hit a blockbuster 2 million sales, we decided to take a look at the newest edition of this iconic game

JOE

With the news that Sim City has hit a blockbuster 2 million sales, we decided to take a look at the newest edition of this iconic game

Offer us a job in the town council making sure that all the water supplies work flawlessly, and we’d probably tell you we’re not interested, but for some reason, whenever we slap in the disc labelled Sim City, for some reason we become enthralled in the business of running a city.

Our first experience with Sim City way back in the day was on the Mega Drive, and although our city wasn’t hugely successful (which might have something to do with the fact that we blew all our money on a giant sports stadium, which might not have been the wisest move) and it was a great moment when the city loaded up and brought our childhood into the 21st century.

The problem, when the game first launched, was the fact that there were massive problems with the servers that stopped people from playing, and losing progress to date. Those problems are gone however, so you don’t need to worry, and trust us, there will be plenty of hours of your spare time logged on this.

The intro is pretty detailed, and runs you through all the necessary elements that you need to know to effectively run the city, and after that it’s up to you, but you’ve got quite a mess to clean up from the last mayor, who didn’t have a clue what he was at.

Once you’ve done that, you need to get your budget and your resources in order, so it did prevent us from blowing our initial budget on a giant stadium (sure it’s a recession, all about fiscal responsibility now).

These are smaller cities than before and they grow pretty rapidly, and you’ll soon run out of space, and need to either start a new city or start bulldozing away older buildings, which is a bit of a problem.

You can, however, choose what type of city to make, much more so than before as you get the opportunity to base your city on gambling, or make an eco-friendly city, or highly educated with plenty of schools and universities. There are plenty of possibilities and it’s really up to you what you choose to do.

Overall the game looks great and has some lovely effects, although the fun and addictiveness won’t last forever unfortunately. We’d also like to be able to play offline, which is a real issue when you’re not connected or having connectivity problems, but we must admit we had some fun.

stars-6

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