I don't usually write game reviews, but I feel like I need a place to get up on my soapbox and shout about this game. This isn't going to be the usual "Waaah always online, waaah I can't pirate this game and play multiplayer" nonsense that's been spammed all over Metacritic & Amazon. There are legitimate complaints about the game but these aren't among them.
First of all, I bought the game on EU release day. This means that I avoided the two days of crazy server congestion and came into the game on the day it started working semi-normally. I did run into a few server issues, mainly on the first day, where it took me 10 minutes to load a City and the game lost one of my Cities after I disconnected from the game (the disconnect was my fault, but I had expected the game to auto-save). From what I can see, the worst of the server issues are behind us.
Having played the game, it has a lot of positives. I love the building upgrades system where buildings are modular and you can tailor them to the needs of your city. The buildings grow with the city, that wind power plant you build at the start can have turbines added to it, then small turbines replaced with larger turbines. You can add more patrol cars & jail cells to your police station. It's pretty fun and means you don't have to keep buying more and more land-intensive public buildings.
The regional development stuff is fun (I'm on a private region with 7 friends and we've managed to build a Great Work and build several tailored cities) and adds another dimension to the game, though I can imagine that playing it with public regions could be a pain as some players will be active and others will be inactive.
Some things appear to be bugged, but actually work as intended. The game is poor at reporting issues, for example factories will complain that they 'don't have enough educated workers' even though your schools have a 100% enrollment rate, then you'll click the Population panel and realize that they just don't have enough workers in whatever income bracket they want to have them in. Generally, if your city has an RCI issue, the Population panel will tell you everything.
Some of the concepts in the game are great, but the implementations are pretty broken: the traffic system seems to force you to play a certain way, as there are no highways you're pretty much reliant on mass transit, which means spamming Park & Rides on both sides of the road and cranking up the number of buses as far as they go. Land value increases painfully slowly, which means that if you're in the red, it stays that way for quite some time.
One of the biggest issues is that one of the systems EA has deactivated, the global market, was supposed to determine the value of commodities. Without it, you can make millions a day just importing components and building TVs. My city runs at 0% tax losing $50k/hour but my TV manufacturing alone brings in enough to turn this $1.2m/day loss into a $2m/day profit.
Oh, and finally, plot sizes. Whereas in Cities XL and SimCity 4, you could build a metropolis with 5 million plus population, SimCity 2013 has painfully small plots. This can be spun any way the game developers want, but when you can fill your plot in 3 hours, micro-management and regional great works are only going to keep you going for so long.
You could wait for EA to iron out the bugs, release the inevitable $20 larger city plots DLC and fix what remains of the server issues, but the fact is that even despite these issues, I can't bring myself to go back to Cities XL. If you like the franchise, this game has immense micromanagement and deep simulation, and they've extended a free upgrade to Limited Edition until 15th March.
Yes, it's Origin-only (so what?); yes, it's always-online (aren't you?) and has evil DRM (damn them trying to stop pirates ripping them off); yes, there are some issues with algorithms & features temporarily disabled; but for fans of the franchise, this is very much a buy, and I'd recommend buying before the Limited Edition offer runs out.
75%.
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11 years, 8 months ago
14 Mar 2013 02:42 CET
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