Maxis are one of those companies that are very good at recreating popular games to keep up with their audience and keeping the technology they use at the top of its game. The Sims is a prime example of their ability to upgrade graphics and the overall game quality as players gain better computers and can handle more. The SimCity franchise is no different! The regeneration of the SimCity franchise will be available Feb 2013 and is definitely a MUST-HAVE for all previous fans of the franchise.
At the Eurogamer Expo, SimCity was one of the first games that I happily queued up to get a look at as I was already looking forward to it – being able to play a demo of the game was just a giant bonus.
The demo was a simple tutorial of the game that took you through a multitude of things which taught you how to play the game with hints on how your actions could affect the way your city runs. For example: If you build educational buildings within your city – you’re making the people smarter and they become more tuned with issues within your city (like pollution etc), which can both be good and bad thing.
So, in the demo you are faced with a numerous amount of protestors at the city hall and you have to make them all happy so they just leave you alone. This includes building a basic road to the nearest motorway (or highway… it’s all American terminology…), turning on the power plant, creating a sewage system, building fire stations – the list goes on. One of the simple parts of the game that impressed me is the way that you are able to ‘upgrade’ buildings and add extra parts onto it. For example: adding a new block to the university or adding more garages to the dump so there are more garbage trucks (or for the English – Dust-bin men) to handle your growing city.
The game also has quests to complete, ranging from the simple “gain 300 population” to “increase your daily income to +$10000”, with many others in between. Individual Sims can also give you quests relating to them and how you can make their lives just that little bit easier.
After creating join roads, segments appear which you can either leave blank or set to a theme: residential, commercial, or industrial. By setting a theme, people that come to your city and will automatically begin to build buildings on that segment relating to that theme. If a building collapses or becomes abandoned on the segment, if you knock it down it frees up space and the Sims begin building on it all again. By having a sweet balance of each zone allows a city to fully be prosperous and hopefully happy.
Finally at the end of the demo you received your first-hand experience of the natural disasters as a large meteor shower falls and destroys half of your city. It was truly amazing, but kind of made me sad as I lost half of my hard work.
Overall, this game is beautiful and is truly going to deliver the city-building simulation revival that everyone has been waiting for. I can’t wait to try out all the awesome features when it releases – including all the multiplayer options.
This was a guest blog from Panzii, check out her blog here!
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