SimCity - or should I say 'PuzzleTown'?

Sims protest for better pathfinding and more intelligence

This week, the flop of a game, SimCity, was delivered to my door after I ordered it on Friday 8th March - days before the dumb AI controversy came to light.

In some ways, I regret my decision to buy SimCity: I thought it was going to be a simulation, I feel cheated, lied to by not only EA (where most of the blame seems to lay) but by good-guy-developers, Maxis. Because of my late order, I managed to avoid the massive server problems throughout SimCity's launch, though my friends and I still needed to relog several times before being able to join the same region. However, the emergence of this new problem of terrible AI really bugs me when I play the game alone.

As a multiplayer experience, SimCity can be really fun. I could spend hours playing that game with my friends, trading resources and workers from HoohaVajiggedy-Ville to work in the oil drilling stations in the next town over, and having murderers and robbers come from my Danish friend's town to prey on my weak, uneducated Sims. I plop schools and police stations in order to send school buses and cop cars to my neighbours to help fix some of their inadequacies, and I zone so much commercial territory that my town looks like a 2km² network designed for a new species of ants which shop for their queen in packs whilst more ants pile in from my very own stretch of highway connected to the world outside. In fact, I was creating a tourist hotspot to compliment the Danish residential town on my right, and the industrial-smoke-fest on my left.



So what is wrong with the game if I am having such a great time with it?

Well, for starters, my friends aren't always online, so in these times I am forced to play alone. This is where the problems shine through the graphically beautiful, tilt-shifted shell of SimCity. Traffic jams literally the length of my town pile up along what is supposed to be a high density avenue; 6 ambulances, 5 cop cars, 2 fire engines & 12 school buses  (all in one long line) are caught outside a burning house as the fire crewmen ignore the flames licking the $50,000 superstructure next door in order to save a burger shop on the other side of town. This isn't just something which happens when your town starts to get really populated - this isn't an avoidable situation, there is no other way to sort my town (and I call it town because 2km² is never big enough to be called a city) so that there are less traffic jams, I can't just put down more fire stations so that all of the fires are given equal priority, my school buses won't disperse in different directions to pick up the children who are yet untouched by education on the west side of my town - this is the only way to play SimCity, deal with the problems or don't play at all.

Eventually, as your phantom population increases, the traffic jams will block every single side street so that no Sim will be able to make it to work or to a home, and your happiness will either drop faster than a slick bass dub and people will leave, giving you a second chance to futilely sort out your road systems in order to handle the traffic better, or your profits will go negative and you will find yourself running out of bonds to take with no way to pay them off without a working population. You will go bankrupt, and you will lose your town. There is no undo button due to the always-on online DRM, there is no way to bulldoze parts of the town and keep the rest, you can not sell unnecessary commodities or raise taxes in order to get your monthly income out of the red, you either clear the town and start again with $50k in the bank, or you move on to your next small plot of land to plonk more sewage centers and power plants down in order to attract more Sims, traffic, fire and murderers to your new utopia.

Operation Stack in PuzzleTown

So SimCity isn't actually a city, it's a town, and it's not even a simulation, it's an unwinnable economic puzzle game which is no fun to play without your friends. It's not the in-depth, funny, caricature of life which we are usually treated to by Maxis, but a game that is meant to be played on the train to work and you can't even do that. PuzzleTown is a casual game at best, and not even a good one.




Dale Nash playing SimCity

Recommended? No

Alternative? SimCity 4