Recent reviews by MikeyTT

I used to enjoy SimCity 4 back in the day, but I've not touched any other city building games since then. When I saw the videos for this I put it on my wishlist, but then forgot about it. When they had the sale a week or so back, I thought what the hell, and bought the deluxe edition.

When you first get dropped into your landscape I was expecting a nice intro tutorial explaining, what does what, how you link roads, etc. but other than it suggesting you make your first road, you're left on your own. With that said the first couple of hours are pretty simple and you level up with relative ease. Juts keep an eye on the icons above the buildings and you can muddle through to begin with. That's no bad thing, as it does encourage you to explore what's available.

But when you start hitting a 5 figure population, your lovely well planned and designed city is far from well planned and designed. You have traffic backing up the freeway, you have red everywhere on your road network, you need to add more power, more water purification, more schools, more police, extra fire stations. I probably spent best part of 2 hours on pause while I sorted my spaghetti roads out so the traffic would flow properly. I destroyed my well planned industrial zone, as it was right where my flyover needed to be. The natives were not happy about that at all ;)

Suddenly the games gear switches and you have a lot more on your plate. Partly because you've opened up more stuff to build and more policies to apply, and your original planned layout just doesn't cut it any more. Then you start filling your tile up and have more demanding citizens. Buying more land to expand is something I should have done sooner, instead of just trying to fix all my current issues, as that would have helped with the road overcrowding.

The depth is incredible, from deathcare, water pipes, city policies, noise pollution and a million other things to consider, it's a really well detailed game. Visually it looks really good and plays extremely well on my old 7950 video card. Even my Lenovo X1 Yoga it plays relatively ok, with a reduction on the detail level (but then I’d expect that, and it still looks good).

- So is it fun?
Yes, lots and very addictive.
- Is it a little frustrating at times?
Yes, can be. I would certainly advise looking through some of the tutorials, as they are very well put together. I'm looking at the rail network tonight, so I'll need to research that.
- Would I recommend it?
Yes, very much so. It's a heap of fun, and even my better half, who's not a gamer has been watching the city evolve and really likes how detailed it is.
- Would I have paid full price for it?
Knowing what I do now, then yes I would. It would be nice if there was a demo version that capped you at 2hrs play, or 4000 citizens. I think many more would get hooked in that time.

If you like this kind of game type, then I think you'll be hooked. So far, after ~18hrs or so, I've not found any bugs, which is great.