Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Easily the worst way to spend $60 since your "Jello of the Month" membership. Wow... So as you no doubt know by now this new release of SimCity has the following major differences from previous versions: 1) You must have a constant internet connection to play. You cannot play without an internet connection- that means no playing on long plane rides or anywhere else you aren't plugged in- usually the best times TO play SimCities of the past. 2) The maps are TINY compared to SimCities of the past, especially SimCity 4. There just isn't room to put all the cool stuff. 3) Although there are grids, roads don't stick to them by default. While some may feel the grid was limiting it had the benefit of keeping straight lines straight, and streets parallel. The SC4 version was far superior to this free form roads in the new version. You can easily put down an expensive mistake that ruins the layout of the city. 4) No "Undo" option. With the chance of city crippling mistakes a bad mouse-click away a basic "Undo last change" or "Go back 1 day" feature was a no brainer. Unfortunately it doesn't exist in this game. You double click instead of single click and you could be dropping a power-plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood. No way to revert to an earlier saved version (because you can't save the city yourself) and now you either have to destroy an expensive power-plant or re-design the city around it to make it work. This doesn't happen in "real" cities so simulation fail. 5) Buildings become "married" to roads. I tried to delete a road to give more room for my Casino to expand and I was warned (thankfully) that bull-dozing that road would also bull-doze the casino itself. 6) Requires far more graphic processing for more basic graphics than SimCity 4. On my current laptop (HP Envy Windows 7, Core i5) I can run SimCity 4 in high/top graphic mode. In the new SimCity almost all graphics were set to "Low" and shadows off completely. The buildings look terrible with these settings. I manually upped the quality and while it did have an affect on framerate it would have been unplayable with the default graphics. The one effect I wanted to get rid of (fog) is not an option to shut off, but it is an option in SimCity 4. Why waste graphics processing power on fog to purposely obstruct the city view is beyond me. SimCity of prior versions worked well with their angle-view, making everything in this SimCity a fully 3D rendered object was a mistake from the start IMO. 7) No more real "zones" like you are used to. In SimCity 4 their zoning was good, you could see how much space a zone takes up, the way it would be pointed, and it would auto-create basic streets within the zone if you wanted. This version does away with all that in favor of just drawing lines along roads to designate R, C, or I. No idea how far back the development will go, very annoying. 8) Abandoned buildings don't ever get fixed up. For some dumb reason you need to be on a constant look-out for abandoned property and bull-doze them or nothing will ever come back again. In real cities private development does buy and demolish abandoned building to put up new ones if demand is high. 9) You try to play and there is no space available- they put you IN LINE to wait to play. They tell you the game will start in "30 minutes." REALLY? I have to wait 30 minutes to play the game I just paid $60 for? I might not want to play in 30 minutes- I want to play the game when I turn it on, that is the point of buying a game! OK, there are some positives but they are drowned out by the fact you can't play when their servers are down which means sometime in the next few years when they abandon this flop you're out your $60 with an unworkable product. Pros- 1) Nice not to have to worry about water pipes- That was annoying in SC4. In this SimCity Water and Electric is automatically a part of the roads you put down- so if a zone connects to a road, it has water (assuming you pump some) 2) Free to "Zone" areas. In a real city it doesn't really cost money to just declare some land Residential or Industrial so glad to see this. (Although you now only start with $50,000, down from $500,000 (on easy) in SC4. 3) It seems easier to get a basic city going. A small city compared to earlier versions but if you get the basics (power, water, and keep pollution away from the residents) you will have a profitable city. As long as the city is profitable you can build just about anything given enough time. The real challenge is in correctly planning such a small city. So overall I say avoid this title like the plague. No doubt it was Maxis/EA management that destroyed this game- they are the ones who required this "always on" internet connection, in hind site this was just a money grab to pull some money out of the SimCity name, they knew there would be thousands of people like me willing to jump into anything with the SimCity name we would throw away $60 no matter what they delivered- and they took full advantage of that. If you're reading this don't make my mistake. Go back to SimCity 4, I re-installed my old copy- it works just fine on Windows 7 64 bit you just have to install it in the c:\program files\ directory NOT the c:\program files(x86)\ that is the default.