The past
summer, here in southwest Idaho, saw a lot of road construction, and building
construction taking place. Each time driving, navigating the detours and trying
to avoid inevitable delays proved fruitless – which often resulted in mutterings
centering on the poor planning and timing.
Why is this
relevant? Easy, a new Sim City title has released and rather than mutter about
how you could do things better, if you were the one planning, zoning and timing
construction, you get a measure of doing the job. Not that it would qualify you
to do it in real life. After all SimCity Societies is a game – albeit a very
entertaining one – and not real life. You won’t be juxtaposing real-world
traffic situations, but rather trying to accomplish goals while building a small
community into a major metropolitan force.
During this
process, you will be micro-managing a great number of items, such as power
resources, commerce, entertainment – all in an effort to keep your citizens, the
Sims, happy.
In some ways
SimCity Societies borrows from city-sim titles. It makes this a much more
personal experience. This time the Sim City title – actually, that would be the
SimCity title – is developed by Tilted Mill Entertainment and this is a very
solid job of integrating a user-friendly interface with bright and colorful
graphical elements that look good both from a distance and up close.
The idea is
a simple one. You start with a bare landscape and drop a street, houses, then
start tending to the needs of your residents with venues, businesses and
decorations. You can go for a certain feel for your town, or mix and match from
the styles available.
Cities can
operate on more than just power. Some buildings require a difference resource,
like creativity. In order for buildings powered by creativity (indicated by a
little painter’s palette above the building) you have to drop decorations that
will feed into that.
But back to
the interface for just a moment … When you see the scope of information that is
available, it can seem a little daunting. But the learning curve is relatively
small and you will be cruising through the game, achieving various goals set
before you. The game measures goals in terms of population growth and citizen
satisfaction.
Another very
nice thing about the interface is not just that it is user friendly, but that it
allows filtering so quickly and easily it almost makes one wonder why other Sim
City titles seemed so overwrought in the interface. Ok, that is not entirely
fair; other SC titles were easily accessible, but Societies does this in a big,
bright and bold manner that will doubtless have broad appeal.
The
interface is the real key to this game. It includes special features that will
give the player, at the press of a button, information about the city. And a
greater emphasis has been placed on the Sims that inhabit this city. In the
past, Sim City titles were about micromanaging the city, but Societies seems to
be refocusing that energy into caring for the people in the town. Think of it
along the lines of a game like Tropico or Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdoms,
but with the huge building power and resources of a Sim City title.
The game
setup includes picking a region from nine available (temperate, alpine, desert,
savanna, temperate coast, temperate mountains, tropical, tropical coast and
tundra), picking a difficulty setting (relaxed, normal and challenging) and
picking an event frequency (low, normal, high and climate only). There is also
an option for your playmode from normal, unlimited simoleans and freeplay. In
normal, buildings are revealed as you earn them. Freeplay unveils all buildings
and gives the player unlimited simoleans.
There are
several areas that you have to pay attention to as your city starts to grow:
productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority and knowledge. The
UI has a bar at the bottom that will show how much is being produced in these
areas as well as how much extra you have. Buildings can either add to the totals
or subtract from them. For example, dropping a Charity Center will cost you 300
simoleans, and give you +8 spirituality while costing you 4 prosperity. A bank
is rated +12 prosperity and +3 authority.
Graphically
this game is pretty. The city teams with life and activities. Zoom in on a
soccer field and you will see people practicing, or cheering on those
practicing. Pick out a sim and he or she will tell you what they want and would
like to do.
The music is
soothing and there are some ambient sounds.
The key to
SimCity Societies ultimately lays in planning. Your city will grow and evolve
and having an idea of where you are going to go to (as in the direction of
growth and such) is vital even when you are first building.
And as for
accessibility, the game was placed in the hands of an 11-year-old girl who was
entrenched with building her city rather quickly. She didn’t have a problem with
the interface and was highly involved in planning her city’s growth. Can you say
instantly hooked?
SimCity
Societies is a very nice game. It is about building and growing and personal
achievement. It does not have strong quest-oriented goals, per se, but does
challenge players to create and plan. Hours can be quickly lost in this world
and that speaks highly of the product.
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Gameplay: 8.6
The game is very
accessible. While seeming to borrow from titles in the past, Societies does give
players a lot of information structured in a user interface that is well
designed.
Graphics: 8.8
The game was
played on a machine with an older Radeon video card, with 512 megs of video RAM
and looked very good. The textures were nice, the shadows and lighting did a
great job of depicting time of day and even the events (consisting of special
effects) looked very good.
Sound:
8.0
Sedate sounds
support the graphics and allow time to slip by without any sense of urgency.
Difficulty: Medium
Concept: 8.5
The previous Sim
City titles seem a little sterile compared to this game. It is bright and lush and feels
like a family game rather than a planning & zoning exercise.
Overall: 8.7
A fun game that
is accessible and seemingly geared for all members of the family. The game has a
really gentle and relaxed feel to it, even when your city starts to hustle and
bustle with businesses going up right and left, and the city coffers are working
hard to keep up with the growth. This is an enjoyable game.
