Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I haven't preordered from Amazon but I preordered it from EA itself. I should have waited til the closed beta to pre-order or not. I regret it. Even the closed beta was a flop. Anyhoo, here's the gist of the game in comparison to SC4. Here's the points listed. If you want a more detailed review, read on below. 1. 2x2km "city" size -2 2. Lack of more transportation options - 1 3. Can no longer specify Light, medium, heavy density zoning -1 4. Wait in line for singleplayer. -2 5. No God-mode terraforming. No longer. -0.5 6. No local saves. If the 'cloud' glitches and your cities (excuse me)...villages roll back, too bad. -1 7. Unrealistic "buffer" zones between "cities" (villages) -0.5 8. No more highways, no direct connection between cities...I mean villages. Read more in detail to understand better. -0.5 9. Anymore, the score for this SimCity, excuse me...SimCityBlock would go below 0 I liken it to reaching absolute zero (which is reachable) but it would be very unnatural.So while reaching a score of 0 is a feat easily achieved by EA, reaching a score below 0 is not easily achieved. Or rather, I'd rather not do that to my favorite franchise because it would be the first on my game shelf to have achieved that (it's not staying there, it's being burned in my fireplace). Here's a +1 point - moddable public buildings. Yay. another +1 - cute graphics..... Actually that should be -1. I want a real looking city. The people are also undetailed and the trees look out of place with the more plastic-y looking buildings. Oh, did I mention the numerous numbers of bugs? No? -1 again. So if we total up the number of points I have for SimCity, the total comes out to be....-0.5/10 Here's the more detailed review for those of you who are not convinced by my simplified points. Small City size. I mean VERY small. 2x2km is a city block basically. It doesn't even count as a city. Real cities sometimes have commercial, residential or industrial zonings this size. Its pathetically small size also reduces innovation for a more organic city infrastructure. This meaning that building roads in squares is better than building in curves. While this holds true for nearly any city out there, consider this: even with efficient infrasture (squares), the maximum population size is capped around 200k. That's a fraction of the population I could get in SC4 and a fraction of a megalopolis, let alone a real city. Hell, the town I live in has more people. AND ITS A TOWN, NOT A CITY!!! Second, lack of transportation. No subways like real cities have to deal with traffic flow. So if you want to recreate big cities like NYC, sorry. No subways. In fact, they got rid of the whole underground. No dealing with your own pipes, etc. Next, you can't build your own railroads. Nope. There's no motivation to have small roads even for local light residential roads unless you want to recreate a city in which a lot of other options available in SC4 are no longer available here. Third, you can't specify light, medium or heavy density zoning anymore. This is retarded since real cities don't function like SimCity social all the time. I like to have a little more control as to what I allow to be built on the zoned land. Fourth, you have to wait in line for your own singleplayer game. YOU HAVE TO WAIT TO PLAY BY YOURSELF!! This is absurd. Fifth, no more god-mode terraforming. While this is a large part of previous SimCities, I personally managed to shrug off the fact that the new one didn't have it. Sixth, no local saves! This is stupid. I can't experiment with the types of cities I want to build so I'm always in a constant state of paranoia. Seventh, retarded region design. While this can be a subjective criticism, hear me out. Why can't I, as a city-builder, touch that green, foresty area between two "cities"? It doesn't act as a buffer or anything, it just frustrates the hell out of me. I can't connect to other "cities"/regions directly but I have to do it via the highway which leads to point eight. Eight, one road to highway. While as an avid SC player, I rarely have highways cross through my cities but I do have one going through a city every now and then in SC4. Here, you can't place highways in city. Wouldn't make much sense anyways with that disgustingly small city plot you have anyways. But then here's the other thing: only ONE road connects to the highway. retarded. There are more points but any more and the score would go into the negatives.