Courtesy of IGN.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/834/834720p1.html
SimCity Societies Review
I think it's time to move out to the country.
by Steve Butts
November 13, 2007 - The idea of a SimCity game that doesn't involve the careful placement of on-ramps, power lines or RCI zones scares some people. They simply won't accept that a game bearing the SimCity brand doesn't include the core features that fans have come to love. Fortunately, we don't agree with those people. A series can sometimes benefit when developers step away from established formats and try something new. The trick, of course, is for the "something new" to be so awesome that we don't miss the old game at all. It's what we're hoping happens with Fallout 3 and Civilization Revolutions.
Unfortunately, it's definitely what did not happen with Tilted Mill's SimCity Societies. Though it can't be faulted for not being a SimCity game (except to the extent that EA irresponsibly branded it as such), SimCity Societies has enough faults of its own that we're not going to run short of things to criticize. While the concept is sound, the game mechanics are too arbitrary and confusing for players looking for the next great city building game.
Rather than forcing players to muck about with strategically placing police stations, setting tax rates and hooking up plumbing, SimCity Societies puts all the focus on managing societal energies -- six different ideals that are produced and consumed in varying quantities by hundreds and hundreds of different buildings. Balancing the competing needs of Creativity and Authority, Prosperity and Spirituality, and Knowledge and Productivity seems like a really engaging concept but it's handled in a way that's not very focused and doesn't even allow for any real gameplay.
To begin with, we're not entirely sure how energies are assigned. Some buildings consume energies that you'd think they'd produce. A bank, for instance, produces Authority energy, but a police station consumes it. I guess I can understand that a city expends Authority energy whenever a member of the community decides to become a police officer. Even so, the game's not even really consistent within itself here. An Alien Artifact Lab consumes Knowledge but an Astrophysics Lab produces it. Why they're different isn't really clear. With these sorts of confusing energy assignments, you'll spend most of your time viewing buildings not by their name or purpose but by their energy levels.
What's worse is that the energies only affect other buildings, leaving your Sims out of the equation entirely. Basically as long as your Sims have a place to sleep, a place to work and a place to play, it doesn't matter one bit whether or not they're living in a totalitarian police state or a hippie commune. It's true that some of your Sims will visit certain buildings and become Specialists of one type or another and can then influence other Sims but the extent to which this kind of indoctrination affects the big picture is pretty small.
There are even a few doubts about whether or not the different energy types impact one another. The Cyberpunk theme doesn't even have any buildings that produce Spirituality, for instance, which calls into question whether or not the need for a particular energy type extends beyond the requirements of the buildings you choose. And since a Cyberpunk city functions just as well without Spiritual energy, do you really need it in any of the other city types? The real deficiencies become apparent when you discover that simple things like bus stops and police stations don't even exist in most of the city styles. The fact that they're missing from the "Normal" city theme is simply hilarious. Fortunately, you're not ever limited to one building theme in the game, so you're free to mix and match for the sake of function or appearance
You can boost your energy production by building special decorations anywhere in your city. These decorations don't do anything but add a few more points of a specific energy type and they don't even need to be located near anything important. Just pile them wherever you want. Now it's true that most of these decorations are small enough to fit into the empty spaces where your buildings don't quite match up, but it seems cheap that they don't have to be anywhere near your homes, workplaces or entertainment venues to have an effect on your Sims. It's almost as if the developers are admitting that they couldn't get the buildings' energy levels to balance on their own so they added this easy way out. Power stations are handled the same way; just put them down anywhere and they'll automatically start sending power to every building on the map.
The city services follow this kind of abstraction to the point where they almost don't even seem recognizable. All your municipal services are treated exactly like businesses, producing and consuming societal energies and in some cases creating specialists that can impact a larger area of the city. The problem is that the buildings just don't work according to city-building logic. Fire stations, for instance, actually make money for your city and benefit from the same commerce boosts that actual businesses enjoy. Maybe the firemen are extorting money from the locals. To make it less realistic, putting out fires isn't something the firemen do on their own; it's actually a special action that the player has to choose each and every time there's a fire to be put out.
We've yet to make sense of the housing situation or the size of the labor force. How is it possible that we have several thousand people living in the city, and less than a thousand people in the work force, and almost no unemployment? We try to match the number of jobs in our city to the number of households currently available but it seems like every family of four workers come with up to a hundred other citizens who do nothing at all except add to the population ticker.
On the plus side, the interface is as pleasantly attractive and convenient as we've come to expect from Sim games in the past. Everything's very readable and responsive and laid out in a way that makes it easy to get hold of the information you want in a hurry. The problem here though is that the game is entirely about balancing energy and making sure that the number of workers and jobs stay relatively close to each other. And since there's no feedback at all on any of those aspects actually within your city, you'll spend 90% of the game playing the info bar at the bottom, reacting only to the numbers going up and down. While that's true of most city building games, at least in Zeus we got to watch little marble blocks pile up while we watched those numbers.
definitely like the visuals in SimCity Societies. They have the highly stylized, colorful look that we've come to expect from recent Sim games. While it might not be to everyone's liking, the cartoon-like graphics suit the game's subject matter very well and give the artists plenty of license to create exaggerated moods that fit whatever style of city you're building. In fact, once you pick enough items from a specific energy type, the whole game will take on some of the flavor of that theme, giving your city even more character and personality. The candy cane lightposts that come with a Creative energy surplus are a nice touch. The security cameras that you get with Authority are more disturbing but no less cool
There are some interesting animations for some of the buildings as well. Police choppers lift off from helipads, while telescopes swing from side to side at the top of giant observatories. Sending out armies of clowns for Mimeaggedon is particularly fun to watch, but I wish there was something cooler to see when the Chocolate Factory launches its Golden Ticket contest. In general the cars and pedestrians go about their business with little to no life at all. Sometimes you'll catch a view of a Sim with a protest sign or something but most of the life is in the buildings.
On the downside, specific buildings can be a bit bland. It doesn't matter so much if the supermarket is hard to spot, but when you've got a raging fire and actually have to hunt for your fire station, you'll start to wonder why the designers didn't choose a building that would be easy to recognize among the other colorful structures.
You'll definitely start to see lots of slow down once your cities grow to a substantial size, and the problem only worsens when you start adding lots of effects. EA has told us that the team is making daily improvements on this front, so we're reasonably sure that the game will be much more enjoyable in the coming weeks. In fact, there's already an update available. We have run into some crashes that basically shut down one of our larger cities. Though we can't predict when it will happen, we can't play more than a few minutes on this larger city without the game shutting down completely.
The music is nearly as good as in the last few Sim titles, which is no small compliment. The score suits the mood of the game very well and tends to put you in a very relaxed state of mind that's perfect for the long-haul sessions that the game requires. Some of the sound effects are a bit bland and seem to pop in and out depending on the position of the camera. Just try scrolling to find a building on fire and you'll hear it instantly leap out in full force when the camera is dead over it and then disappear completely the instant you move the camera away.
Finally, the game should benefit from loads of downloadable mod content accessible through the game's launcher. Those who are skilled in XML editing should have no trouble adjusting the game to their liking, or even adding their own visuals to create their own themes. As with most Sim games we expect there to be a healthy offering of new content, but it certainly wouldn't sway us to buy the game in the first place.
Closing Comments
While there are achievements and medals to be earned within the game, there's no real point to playing SimCity Societies beyond simply seeing if you can get the whole thing up and running without losing money. Artistic types can certainly use the game to create some spectacular cityscapes but trying to tie them into a specific function isn't going to be easy.
That's fun by itself for a short period but you'll constantly be battling the developers' decisions about how the game should work. The energy assignments don't always make a lot of sense but even when they do, the energy really has no real effect on the character of your city or its inhabitants. Without some sort of scripted challenges, it all just feels like you're just spinning your wheels.
5.5 Presentation
It's an interesting concept that's derailed by both a lack of focus and predictable interdependence of the components.
7.0 Graphics
Colorful and stylish but not very easy to read. Where is my fire station again?
8.0 Sound
Good music and ambient sounds bring the world to life. Effects pop in and out.
4.5 GameplayTalk about sound and fury... The lack of a campaign isn't the problem. It's the lack of a clear purpose.
5.0 Lasting Appeal
Like all sandbox games, it depends on your patience. With a game this bad, you won't have much.
5.8 Mediocre OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)
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