Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

...strangled by the unwelcome and relentless encroachment of social media and DRM. When I first saw the concept art for the next SimCity over a year ago, I was pscyhed. It looked so sleek and beautiful. It also promised to be as deep and sophisticated as SimCity 4. The initial marketing campaign heralded the game as a return to the franchise's roots for the fans of all previous SimCities. After the backlash EA received from the farmed out and dumbed down SimCity Societies, I was hopeful and almost confident they had learned their lesson, and having reinstated Maxis as developer, would finally give us the SimCity we've all been wanting. I could not have been more wrong. It was so simple. All they had to do was give us SimCity 4 with curvy roads and updated graphics. EA, Will Wright and the original Maxis team already gave you the winning formula! You could have spared the R&D expenses of trying to reinvent the wheel. And I'm sorry Kip, Ocean, and Lucy, but a Multiplayer Online SimCity with less creative control was never what we had in mind. How could you have been so tone-deaf? Please get off of the Social Media bandwagon. Instead of a sophisticated and modern city simulation, we've been given a cartoonish, watered-down game for pre-schoolers and Facebook gamers that seems to fit more between the worlds of Bob the Builder and FarmVille than SimCity. Although the game has some fun features (ploppables and building upgrades for example), it is but a shadow of what was promised, and is a serious downgrade from the creative capabilities of it's predecessor. I want to sculpt the land I want to build on. I want to build my own expressways. I want to decide where my airport will be placed. I want to decide how large or small my city will be, and build bridges across canyons, soaring overpasses, exotic tourist traps, busy train terminals, crime ridden slums, and plush neigborhoods of the uber-rich (where my Mayor house is coincidentally located). I want to do all of that with the challenge of also meeting my citizen's requirements and balancing my budget. And I want to be able to save my city to my harddrive, so your servers don't screw up my creation! This game has just gone so far backwards. It's SimCity Lite, which is exactly the reason SimCity Societies was so poorly received. Despite it's flaws and bland personality, Cities XL 2011 got it almost right. Unfortunately that game has issues using multi-core processors. I feel so frustrated having this beautiful and powerful computer that I would have been salivating over 10 years ago when I was playing SimCity 4, but no proper city building simulation to play on it. (On a side note, if I hear one more Game Developer talk about how they are incorporating Facebook or Twitter into their computer game, I'm going to pour molten lead into my ear canals. I have social media fatigue...I'm sick of it bombarding me everywhere I turn. Games like SimCity appeal to the creative introvert in each of us. It's like gardening; it's a form of meditation meant to be done solo. I just want to shut the door and quietly play a game by myself once and while. Don't take that away from me, thank you.)