SimCity

 PC
User Score
2.2

Generally unfavorable reviews- based on 4557 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 602 out of 4557
  2. Mixed: 428 out of 4557
  3. Negative: 3,527 out of 4557
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  1. StukaJU87c
    Mar 15, 2013
    7
    The user scores are pretty ridiculous here. I mean yes the launch was all kinds of messed up, even still it can be hard to actually play the game...but aside from that I believe it's a decent game...until you run out space to build. The city size is a crippling limitation. Don't feed into the BS that it's because of the inter connectivity of the different cities in a region....that couldThe user scores are pretty ridiculous here. I mean yes the launch was all kinds of messed up, even still it can be hard to actually play the game...but aside from that I believe it's a decent game...until you run out space to build. The city size is a crippling limitation. Don't feed into the BS that it's because of the inter connectivity of the different cities in a region....that could easily be scaled up. The largest maps contain 4 regions of 4 city lots. One city should take up not just those lots, but the entire area...the entire map even if the player chooses. I will give it a 7 because aside from those aspects, the game is nice. Cities XL '13 has better graphics...I will probably go back to playing that.… Expand
  2. Friendzie
    Mar 15, 2013
    6
    People go on and on about the online-only, but that is only a temporary issue. The biggest problem with Simcity that's been discovered since its launch is that the AI the game uses for the citizens is absolutely abysmal. Citizens don't really live anywhere or have jobs. They just appear out of houses each day and roam around looking for jobs. If they cant find any, the housing losesPeople go on and on about the online-only, but that is only a temporary issue. The biggest problem with Simcity that's been discovered since its launch is that the AI the game uses for the citizens is absolutely abysmal. Citizens don't really live anywhere or have jobs. They just appear out of houses each day and roam around looking for jobs. If they cant find any, the housing loses happiness. It doesn't matter if all your jobs are connected via roads. The citizens will simply march to the nearest jobs and keep going door to door. What this means is that your important mining industry on the other side of town will keep closing due to worker shortages, while some citizens will still complain they couldn't find a job. The only way for a player to fix this is by meticulous trial and error or by making the city have only one winding snake-like avenue with a good distribution of zones so that it's impossible for citizens to not find the local shopping and industry every day. Somehow the game is still pretty fun for a city-builder, but I hope they fix the idiotic AI.… Expand
  3. FLyNn
    Mar 15, 2013
    7
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The best new thing in Sim City is: you can help your friends with means. And also the new buildings makes the game more beautiful than the other "Sim Cities".
    The worst thing in it is: you really needs to connect to the server to play, and now there are many "network disconnects".    … Expand
  4. guitarmaniac005
    Mar 15, 2013
    2
    Although this game could have been something amazing. EA and maxis decided they wanted more money... so they added DRM.... the maps are too small for building space and on top of that Maxis developers lied to us by saying the game needed an online connection. Don't buy this game, I do not recommend it
  5. Matthewlh
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    I wanted Sim City, not Sim City Online
    If I wanted to play with other towns it should be my choice
    I should not be forced to play with others
    did I mention that you always have to be online?
  6. PC-EliTiST
    Mar 15, 2013
    1
    "EA destoying games" moto started by some "whiners" -a few will say, but currently is has become an indisputable reality. They bought all the good games because they have investors with much money. Those investors now sit in their 5millions vila and receive from the gamer's pain. Check the latest games that all of them have been released in a not even beta form, and you'll understand what"EA destoying games" moto started by some "whiners" -a few will say, but currently is has become an indisputable reality. They bought all the good games because they have investors with much money. Those investors now sit in their 5millions vila and receive from the gamer's pain. Check the latest games that all of them have been released in a not even beta form, and you'll understand what happened to Sim4. They want to make as much money as they can, but they invest as less as they can.… Expand
  7. Xeno99
    Mar 15, 2013
    3
    I read news about it, but I decided to take the bait and see what the game is all about because I am (now was) a simcity fan. I bought it a week after it came out so I didn't have much server issues. Presentation may be pretty(cities they show you in youtube looks great, which made me buy the game) but once you get down into playing it, you realize so many things broken or missing. ThingsI read news about it, but I decided to take the bait and see what the game is all about because I am (now was) a simcity fan. I bought it a week after it came out so I didn't have much server issues. Presentation may be pretty(cities they show you in youtube looks great, which made me buy the game) but once you get down into playing it, you realize so many things broken or missing. Things that are broken (such as simple pathfinding) was commented by EA that they will fix it soon. Other things that are broken (such as multiplayer), is broken and will be for a very long time until they fix the servers and fix the way cities interact within regions. Things that are missing, EA will probably sell them for bucks (subway, zoo, etc etc). In summary, they didn't deliver what they promised to, and while it is fine that they wanted to build from ground up, it doesn't mean you take contents out of your previous simcity. This game is a utter disaster.… Expand
  8. sssfdg
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    I wasn't foolish enough to buy this game, Thankfully. The DRM that EA has instituted is unforgivable. Companies like EA need to learn a lesson to start treating their consumer base with more respect. I have for years not boycotted every game EA makes (beside BF3... which is awesome btw). EA YOU SUCK BALLS. PLEASE LEARN FROM THIS DISASTROUS MISTAKE.
  9. gnilbert
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    This game is the result of catastrophic failure at every level of the design process. Even if you *can* stomach the always-online DRM that's been spun as "a rich social experience," you can't help but notice that (a) the "rich" social experience is clearly incidental to the core game play, and (b) it doesn't actually work 10 days after launch. That means the decision to force-feed theThis game is the result of catastrophic failure at every level of the design process. Even if you *can* stomach the always-online DRM that's been spun as "a rich social experience," you can't help but notice that (a) the "rich" social experience is clearly incidental to the core game play, and (b) it doesn't actually work 10 days after launch. That means the decision to force-feed the consumer a dubious collection of non-functional features was clearly made by someone in a suit who's never actually played a game.

    What makes the promotion of these "rich" online features particularly painful is that they are offered in place of a wide variety of features found in earlier SimCity games. You can't place one-way roads, you can't zone mixed density along a single street, you can't use subways, the cities aren't as large as the tiniest maps available previous incarnations, there are no city ordinances, there are no histograms for age groups, education levels the list goes on. It's sickening to read a review of SimCity 4 and compare the features of that game to this travesty. The next complete failure in this title is the much-hyped simulation itself: GlassBox. Everything in the simulation sims, stundents, garbage trucks, buses *everything* is simulated using the same logic they use to simulate the sewage that flows in pipes under the city. Maxis said this explciticly. And the quality of traffic, power, water coverage, and all the rest are a complete trainwreck. But the worst part about this game's release? There is no game. There is no strategy. The entire concept of balancing the needs of your city is completely gone. You don't need industrial. You don't need commercial. In fact, you can build massively profitable cities using only a few service buildings, residential zoning, and some parks. That's it. And the developers are standing by this joke of simulation as "working as designed."

    NO ONE should EVER buy a game that was so badly designed, so ineptly delivered, or so grossly deceptive in its marketing. Maxis has burned SimCity and salted the ground I can only pray they never attempt a sequel.    … Expand
  10. Mistafreeze2009
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    This is SimTown, not SimCity.

    After a week of not being able to play, the excitement of finally getting in was quickly overcome by the crap-tastic way this game is put together. If you can get past the server issues, underlying problems with the game mechanics themselves quickly become apparent. Cars drive in circles, Sims don't actually have designated homes...or jobs for that matter.    This is SimTown, not SimCity.

    After a week of not being able to play, the excitement of finally getting in was quickly overcome by the crap-tastic way this game is put together. If you can get past the server issues, underlying problems with the game mechanics themselves quickly become apparent. Cars drive in circles, Sims don't actually have designated homes...or jobs for that matter. At times I've actually been confused if I was playing a horrible fire fighting simulation, as there are always multiple buildings burning. The icing on the cake: constant disconnects. Login queues. I could forgive the issues with the GlassBox engine for now, it's new. But the always on DRM and constant server issues make this game unplayable. This game could've had endless potential, if it wasn't an EA game.    … Expand
  11. consiefe
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    Broken mechanics such as no need to make any Industrial zones especially and no need for commercials also are unacceptable. There is no meaningful corelation between zones or agents. This game is painting zones with no purpose! Besides all agents are moving mindlessly, creating chaos. ie While there is an avenue goes to point A and a dirt road, they choose dirt one for being a bit shorterBroken mechanics such as no need to make any Industrial zones especially and no need for commercials also are unacceptable. There is no meaningful corelation between zones or agents. This game is painting zones with no purpose! Besides all agents are moving mindlessly, creating chaos. ie While there is an avenue goes to point A and a dirt road, they choose dirt one for being a bit shorter then avenue although traffic is hell on that. Firetrucks respond all together to the same fire while your city is on the fire. List goes on and on. God bless us! That's not even a game.

    Stay away, because i don't think developers will accept their fault and fix these problems.    … Expand
  12. azio
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    Bought this game to support MAXIS and the Sim City Franchise.

    In truth this game is almost as awful as simcity societies. I asked for a refund within 7 days of paying expecting legal protection by the strict UK Statutory rights here but apparently it isn't origins "policy". So they can sell badly written games which are not functional and get away with it, essentially stealing your    Bought this game to support MAXIS and the Sim City Franchise.

    In truth this game is almost as awful as simcity societies. I asked for a refund within 7 days of paying expecting legal protection by the strict UK Statutory rights here but apparently it isn't origins "policy". So they can sell badly written games which are not functional and get away with it, essentially stealing your money for a fraudulent claim of the product being complete.

    I've been trying to play the game online in multiplayer mode, that is not on my own singleplayer, and can never get it to work.

    The reason? Apparently the sim city limited edition does not filter out the servers or cities used by players who have different buildings and a different copy of the game. So this annoying message will come up very often when trying to reclaim an abandoned city.

    The only way is to make a game yourself or find an empty slot, but that has been in fact very hard and almost impossible. The "Load more" button for the available games is badly thought out, and being thrown off 30 or so times is extremely annoying. There is no way to tell if the city is abandoned or not until you click on it. What is this madness?

    Many claims and updates from Maxis, but I esssentially feel robbed. Added to this I have been told that I have no statutory rights, which is as usual the general illegal EA way. I think they should not get away with it this time so am giving an extremely negative review to boycott this game. Since my right to a refund was apparently waived when I signed the origin agreement., This is criminal and at best fraudulently nefarious activity by a software developer and publisher that should know better.

    Stay AWAY.

    Best Wishes,
    Adam

    Best,
    A    … Expand
  13. FreakyLord
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    Childish, low-scaled, online, flawed... City simulation algorithms are meant to entertain and not simulate. It's not simcity 5 it's Sims 4. Another franchise built on past developers' skill just jumped the shark.
  14. thequailboy
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    I have managed to play for around 20 hours. On THREE occasions, after spending HOURS AND HOURS building up my city the game said 'Could not process City, please quit' then when it tried to recover the city it just rolled it back to a patch of grass! THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ALL THREE OF MY CITIES. WHAT IS THE POINT! IN PLAYING A GAME THAT DELETES EVERYTHING YOU DO AND DOES NOT LET YOU SAVEI have managed to play for around 20 hours. On THREE occasions, after spending HOURS AND HOURS building up my city the game said 'Could not process City, please quit' then when it tried to recover the city it just rolled it back to a patch of grass! THIS HAS HAPPENED TO ALL THREE OF MY CITIES. WHAT IS THE POINT! IN PLAYING A GAME THAT DELETES EVERYTHING YOU DO AND DOES NOT LET YOU SAVE ANYTHING TO OUR HARD DRIVE? ARE YOU INSANE? WASTE OF MONEY AND TIME.… Expand
  15. 1Khronos
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    This game is truly pathetic and has caused me more grief than actual enjoyment. Not only was it released on the 7th of March for me which is 2 days after the "official" release date, but playing the game has been far from an enjoyable experience.

    For the first week, I couldn't even logon to the game due to EA's servers being inundated with traffic. When I finally could, I realised how    This game is truly pathetic and has caused me more grief than actual enjoyment. Not only was it released on the 7th of March for me which is 2 days after the "official" release date, but playing the game has been far from an enjoyable experience.

    For the first week, I couldn't even logon to the game due to EA's servers being inundated with traffic. When I finally could, I realised how poor the actual gameplay was. Most notably, you're given a tiny map to work with which is a fraction the size it was in Simcity 4 and leaves you very limited options to expand your city.

    To top it all off, one and a half weeks after the game was finally activated on my account, Origin asked me to "re-activate" Simcity and asked for a product key. When I tried entering the product key I paid for, Origin advised me that the code has already been used. When I contacted Electronic Arts, I was told there was nothing they could do.

    This game truly deserves a 1 star rating due to its lack of features and extremely poor handling of its release by Electronic Arts.    … Expand
  16. Glychd
    Mar 15, 2013
    3
    Disregarding all of the bugs on release, this game still has problems. There are only really 4 hours of gameplay, and cities don't connect properly throughout the region. I found the longest it took (even in the most prime city locations) to cap out my city, to the point where I could no longer build anything (because of space) and every building was upgraded to a skyscraper, with maxDisregarding all of the bugs on release, this game still has problems. There are only really 4 hours of gameplay, and cities don't connect properly throughout the region. I found the longest it took (even in the most prime city locations) to cap out my city, to the point where I could no longer build anything (because of space) and every building was upgraded to a skyscraper, with max tech, was four hours. Within four hours I was generating millions of dollars every 20 minutes or so, and the only thing I could do is start over. Which may be fine for some people, but keep in mind that when you start over, you can either pick from one of the 3 cities connected to yours, or start over completely in a city that is not connected, but within the same zone. Here is the catch. Those three cities that are connected, will all be in terrible locations. They will either be riddled with mountains, minimizing your space. Or divided completely by Water, using up your space. The cities are just too small to really get in-depth, and sink hours into this game. That wouldn't be such a big problem if every city in the region connected, but they don't. And since this game focuses on multiplayer so much, the cities that are connected to you will likely be taken up by your friends. Thus this game gets a 3. It's fun, for four hours, then it sucks. Don't bother. This is nothing like Simcity 4, it is at least 4 steps in the wrong direction. Everything is oversimplified to the point where the bulk of your time is spent sitting, waiting for money to come in, and occasionally demolishing an abandoned building.… Expand
  17. Fonjask
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    Was looking forward to this game. Haven't been able to play for more than 30 minutes yet because of failing servers. Not being able to play 0/10....
  18. wallpaper_01
    Mar 15, 2013
    7
    Crazy reviews on here, so many 0's... Common, chill out!

    I was discussing this with my housemate last night and I think that this game is done so well that it is getting negative reviews! Let me explain... It has a brilliant UI, everything is simple to understand and it is so accurate that we almost want it to do everything! Cities in real life are so complex and this game really is    Crazy reviews on here, so many 0's... Common, chill out!

    I was discussing this with my housemate last night and I think that this game is done so well that it is getting negative reviews! Let me explain...

    It has a brilliant UI, everything is simple to understand and it is so accurate that we almost want it to do everything! Cities in real life are so complex and this game really is pretty accurate, its amazing to watch. Because there are no subways, terraforming etc we get angry, why are they not there?! But so much is there!

    Anyway DRM, people chill out who cares honestly, I waited 4 days after release to play and it all works fine except Leaderboards. I will mark down 1 point for DRM. Also because I can't play it offline on the move, I don't want to but I could see some people would want to. Seeing people give this game 0 because of DRM is idiotic.

    I mark down another point for the map sizes, this is my main gripe about the game. I want to 'design' my city but I feel like you can't. You can at first but demand makes you need to create packed in dense cities that all end up looking the same. You have the tools to be able to, like different class ranges but the city is far too small to do that. Plus specialist cities? No, I want option of all in one like LA, which has everything.

    3rd mark down is for little things missing like subway, little bugs, I don't like the big works idea, I just want a full airport 'in' my city, no bridges when you want them etc...

    Can or will all this stuff be fixed with a patch? I think it could be, but will it? Probably not. If the sims is anything to go by, there will be many expansions to this game.

    7/10    … Expand
  19. gmorales
    Mar 15, 2013
    0
    It's a good game, but EA deserves nothing. You know, it's just EA, and its always online connection DRM must NOT be tolerated in a single player experience. Never. Even if now they say that "it was thought as a multiplayer experience". Well NO. I want to play alone, I paid a lot for the game and I had a painful experience even when trying to finish the tutorial. May this serve as anIt's a good game, but EA deserves nothing. You know, it's just EA, and its always online connection DRM must NOT be tolerated in a single player experience. Never. Even if now they say that "it was thought as a multiplayer experience". Well NO. I want to play alone, I paid a lot for the game and I had a painful experience even when trying to finish the tutorial. May this serve as an example for other publishers and devs thinking in doing the same. Among others, Blizzard failed, Activision Failed, an now EA failed. Game is good, but publisher is not. Sorry Maxis, nothing personal.… Expand
  20. Hatchetman
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    This game is broken in ways we have only begun to comprehend

    To say that EA has not been forthcoming about the limitations of the game would be a gross understatement. I've owned the game for over a week now, but due to the fact that you have to be able to connect to the EA servers to play even a single player game, I have been unable to play the game for at least half the time I have    This game is broken in ways we have only begun to comprehend

    To say that EA has not been forthcoming about the limitations of the game would be a gross understatement. I've owned the game for over a week now, but due to the fact that you have to be able to connect to the EA servers to play even a single player game, I have been unable to play the game for at least half the time I have possessed it. Even on the days that it has been working, I'm often unable to start new cities or save the existing one because I will get disconnected while playing the game. It's also not uncommon to have to sit in a queue for up to two hours to connect to one of the servers. As your cities are not shared between servers, you're stuck if you want to continue a particular city.

    As there is no ability to manually save your city, you are completely at the mercy of the network connection to EA in order to save your game, and you can't control when it saves. It's not uncommon for a city to simply be annihilated by disasters with no real ability to recover.

    You also cannot terraform land as you could in Simcity 4, Simcity 3000, and even Simcity 2000. This means that your stuck with whatever land mass that they give you to work with, and not even a map generator, only premade regions.

    The map size is limited to 2km x 2km which is quite small, likely smaller than Simcity 4's medium size, which is far too small for the scope of this game. The AI is broken such that you cannot get the city much over 200,000 people without the entire city falling apart due to the poor traffic AI that apparently uses Shortest Path First routing which causes total gridlock. The AI's ability to poorly coordinate your emergency services cannot be understated, it's nearly impossible to put out more than one fire at a time for example. It's not even worth building more than one fire department.

    In short, EA appears to have stolen $65 from me, and many thousands of other individuals who are equally displeased with the situation. They have broken one of the most successful game franchises, typically the best examples of the simulation genre, and show no remorse, and no sign that they really have any intention of fixing it.    … Expand
  21. mountainpony
    Mar 14, 2013
    7
    First off, I have to get this out of the way; I am not nor have ever been employed by EA or Maxis (or by anyone, for that matter, with even loose ties in the gaming industry). I am just an avid gamer. I hold no grudges against any developers or publishers, although, as in this case, it's pretty evident when one, or both, of them slips up.

    EA undeniably soured the release of an otherwise    First off, I have to get this out of the way; I am not nor have ever been employed by EA or Maxis (or by anyone, for that matter, with even loose ties in the gaming industry). I am just an avid gamer. I hold no grudges against any developers or publishers, although, as in this case, it's pretty evident when one, or both, of them slips up.

    EA undeniably soured the release of an otherwise sweet game with SimCity, albeit not in the usual way they're accused of. But when we look passed the Always Online DRM, how much of gamers' quibbles with SimCity are actually EA's fault?

    To begin, there have been some redeeming things EA have done (or tried to do) in response to all the anger and frustration aimed at them. On March 18th for instance, "a free PC download game from the EA portfolio" will be available to all active SimCity users. It took less than three days (which by industry standards is blazing fast) to drastically improve server load and performance and increase the total number of servers. How long has Crysis 3 been out? Black Ops 2? Have they even acknowledged the issues with their servers? (For those who don't know what I mean by this, I have been unable to get a consistently lag-free connection with either those games in multiplayer, especially Black Ops 2, and it's certainly not my IP)

    But let's focus on the major complaints from gamers regarding SimCity: small city sizes, forced multiplayer, micro-transactions, inability to save/load on HDD, and Day One DLC. At least one of these isn't even true, and all seem quite clearly to me as design choices made by the developer, Maxis. Let's get two of the easy complaints out of the way; privatizing a game is as simple as checking a box, and I have yet to find ANY micro-transaction opportunity (I don't even see what purpose they'd serve beyond catering to the laziest of players), and even if they were everywhere, they're little more than a purchasable cheat, having no effect on gameplay for those who choose to ignore them. Day One DLC can be controversial, but really? This "DLC" is a tourist attractions package of sorts that offers real-world wonders and buildings such as the Eiffel Tower. Unless you want to recreate Paris, there is absolutely nothing you're missing out on. SimCity was always a creative game where you built cities from your imagination.

    The inablitiy to save onto a private hard disk is kind of dumb but necessary to the whole idea of a pseudo-MMO city simulator. Your cities breathe and produce and work with (or against) other players and their cities. That can't happen if players can simply load a past save when something doesn't go their way. I personally like this feature and don't mind that my saves are located in a "cloud" instead of a physical disk (although the option for both would certainly be preferable). The lack of a save/load feature, however, is a direct result of the more fundamental design choice regarding online play, one that I find very implausible was forced upon Maxis by EA. Many of the game's design choices in general stem from the questionable decision to make SimCity an "online game," like Diablo III or even Guild Wars, which is decision made by Maxis. And if you insist that EA forced Maxis to make SimCity online only from the reboot's inception, then I find it very hard to believe Maxis couldn't get the as big a game as SimCity published under another company that didn't choose to force online play, if they were against the idea that is.

    The final complaint and also my personal gripe is indeed the city size. They're simply too small. The ability to connect multiple cities, using them in tandem to create a mega city, does help mend this but there should be an option to extend city boundaries, or at least a game mode where the limit is removed. A recent interview with a lead game designer from Maxis states that they intend to increase the size limits "eventually."

    Now, EA has been receiving the blame for this design choice since the beta, when it's quite clear to me Maxis should be receiving the brunt of it. I don't quite understand why anyone would even sneer in EA's direction on this one; am I to assume their unabashed greed somehow accounts for them not allowing Maxis to increase the city limits? I don't see how it earns them a profit; in fact it's done the opposite.

    In the end, EA screwed up big time with the servers, but they've made evident and serious attempts to rectify their mistake (at least I feel that way). Meanwhile, Maxis has gotten out seeming guilt-less, when it seems they're liable for most of the complaints. True, the DRM needs to go, not only from EA but industry-wide (I'm looking at you Blizzard).

    I'm judging the game for what it is in it's current playable state, a solid 7. Given time for updates and player mods, I'm sure this game will be incredible and the city limits will hopefully be expanded sooner rather than later.    … Expand
  22. Marvis
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    Still problems with having my cities lost... I can't believe that this long after the game has been released I am having issues just saving the damn game....
  23. tartarus1312
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    First of all, there is the always-on DRM. EA tried to lie about this by saying the server connection was essential to running the game because a lot of calculations were made on the server. Turns out, that's not the case, as proven by a modder: http://www.geek.com/articles/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-20130314/. So the server connection is just for theirFirst of all, there is the always-on DRM. EA tried to lie about this by saying the server connection was essential to running the game because a lot of calculations were made on the server. Turns out, that's not the case, as proven by a modder: http://www.geek.com/articles/games/modder-proves-simcity-can-run-offline-indefinitely-20130314/. So the server connection is just for their ridiculous DRM.

    Second, the game itself is not even good. The AI is dumber than Simcity 4 from 10 years ago. The pathfinding is especially horrible. Vehicles and Sims take completely insensible paths to reach their destinations. This leads to traffic jams all the time which shouldn't exist. School buses run empty but don't pick up children because they are full. Emergency vehicles get stuck in traffic, and also drive past their destination because they're on the wrong side of the road. These are just specific examples of how the game's AI is terrible.

    Thirdly, thanks to EA hating single-player games, and trying to make this an always-on multiplayer game, the amount of space you have to build your city is pathetic. It looks more like SimVille: The Facebook Game than a respectable PC game. I was looking for a modern, updated version of Simcity 2000 and Simcity 4. With today's graphics and CPU power, we could have built sprawling metropolises with stunning graphics. Instead, we have this pile of rubbish.

    I think it is time for gamers to simply boycott EA as a whole. Battlefield 4 is coming out? It's just a game, you can do without it.

    Don't buy EA games. whether created or published by them. Period.    … Expand
  24. AngryRob
    Mar 14, 2013
    10
    After spending over 80 hours constructing about 8 different cities each to a population of 100-250k, and with a few remaining very profitable and a few burning to the ground, i can say with all confidence that this is an excellent sim city game. not many games can suck so many hours of my life away in just the first 2 weeks of launch. sim city managed to do that, and it gets major kudos for that.
  25. TheAgentBrandon
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    This is not a game. It's a loading screen with server errors. Don't waste $60. I can't believe EA could do something so incredibly stupid. I hope this company rots.
  26. arkhanari
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    Bought the game. The game requires you to be online to connect to EA servers. Problem is: the servers do not work. Then EA tells us that the servers are doing computations to make the game work which has been found out to be a lie. Then EA tells us the game cannot run offline as well as it being near impossible to make the game work if you build outside the borders which also has beenBought the game. The game requires you to be online to connect to EA servers. Problem is: the servers do not work. Then EA tells us that the servers are doing computations to make the game work which has been found out to be a lie. Then EA tells us the game cannot run offline as well as it being near impossible to make the game work if you build outside the borders which also has been found to be a lie. A guy modded the game in one week to enable highway building and allow you to build outside borders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmce9oIxJag&feature=player_embedded).

    I will never ever buy another game from EA and neither should you.    … Expand
  27. peterplane80
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    Drm, internet connection, small map but mainly a buggy game and the worst support i 've ever seen since battlefield 3... Thanks Ea Last game i bought on origin or EAgame...
  28. BastardMike
    Mar 14, 2013
    1
    Don't buy this game (at least until they fix it or modders do)! It's ridden with server problems and bugs galore. After logging in, the available regions that others play play on are all full or bugged, so you can only play with friends (which they have to be on the same server) or by yourself. Achievements are only carried on the server you play. When you do play with other people, theDon't buy this game (at least until they fix it or modders do)! It's ridden with server problems and bugs galore. After logging in, the available regions that others play play on are all full or bugged, so you can only play with friends (which they have to be on the same server) or by yourself. Achievements are only carried on the server you play. When you do play with other people, the server is so laggy that even talking in chat, there's a 10-30 second delay. The game is stupidly simple, it doesn't have the same complexity as previous versions. This game was not ready nor properly tested for launch, don't buy it!… Expand
  29. Rageraven
    Mar 14, 2013
    1
    While always-online DRM is irritating, it's not really a problem for me, as I have an Internet connection wherever I play games anyway. So I could live with that. I was totally fine with connection problems the first week, knowing it would stabilize later. If the simulation was even close to what was promised. After building a few 'cities' and you are done with the initial creativeWhile always-online DRM is irritating, it's not really a problem for me, as I have an Internet connection wherever I play games anyway. So I could live with that. I was totally fine with connection problems the first week, knowing it would stabilize later. If the simulation was even close to what was promised. After building a few 'cities' and you are done with the initial creative exploration, you really start to notice how simplified the simulation really is. Destroyed the whole experience for me. And I think it's too fundamental things for the developers to ever fix with patches. Going back to SimCity 4 and Tropico.… Expand
  30. Mooseda
    Mar 14, 2013
    7
    I definitely overall agree that the online-only DRM management for this game is superbly silly. But I really feel for the developers and engineers behind this project that made it come alive. I bet you they have been pouring their soul into this project for years BUT the head producers and directors and managers all made this absurd blueprint on trying to put a fight on piracy when inI definitely overall agree that the online-only DRM management for this game is superbly silly. But I really feel for the developers and engineers behind this project that made it come alive. I bet you they have been pouring their soul into this project for years BUT the head producers and directors and managers all made this absurd blueprint on trying to put a fight on piracy when in fact, I bet you there's less than a 8-13% population out there that REALLY know how to install a cracked game. If I was creating a great game and only 8-13% of them are hacking it because they figured out how to, by all means I would not mind. It's the head of EA that took in the developers of Maxis and corporate-ized them into a DLC and DRM machine. I support the game because of the engineers and the engine.. but I DO NOT respect the politics on how this game was born and how its maintained for audiences.… Expand
  31. Dremord1
    Mar 14, 2013
    4
    SimCity is a fine arcade game to play for a little bit I played 15 hours... but that seems a little short for a $60 game! There isn't much to do in this game other than get frustrated at protesters, not having enough money without pissing off your people and making your people leave and having too much to deal with with how little money that you can accumulate for most of the game. I'veSimCity is a fine arcade game to play for a little bit I played 15 hours... but that seems a little short for a $60 game! There isn't much to do in this game other than get frustrated at protesters, not having enough money without pissing off your people and making your people leave and having too much to deal with with how little money that you can accumulate for most of the game. I've never played it, but personally Tropico 3 or 4 looks better since it appears to have more political depth, but that's just me.… Expand
  32. Nate_T
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    EA blatantly lied to everyone about the DRM. Modders have already shown it only needs to connect to the servers once every 30 minutes in single player. All actions work while being disconnected from the internet. EA you should be ashamed.
  33. dustin12345678
    Mar 14, 2013
    5
    I am going to ignore the server issues per this review. Great looking game. Great concepts. Specializations nice. The biggest issue with this game is the map size and inability to edit regions. Not possible to focus on nice looking City. Instead, game forces you to really manage how City functions. Older SimCity games allowed you to manage but ALSO focus on aesthetics. Not really sure whyI am going to ignore the server issues per this review. Great looking game. Great concepts. Specializations nice. The biggest issue with this game is the map size and inability to edit regions. Not possible to focus on nice looking City. Instead, game forces you to really manage how City functions. Older SimCity games allowed you to manage but ALSO focus on aesthetics. Not really sure why it forces you to play online because me and my buddy haven't been able to connect on a private region for over a week now. I feel like Maxis and EA dropped the ball on this. There was no point to have agents and individual people simulated in this game. Should have just built off of what made SimCity 4 great. I am going to hope this gets better a year from now (bigger maps, regional editing capabilities, off-line play), but i'm not going to hold my breath. I have been waiting ten years for this? guess i'll open SC4 back up.… Expand
  34. Victory
    Mar 14, 2013
    3
    I am assessing this game based on my 25 hours of experience. This game is fun up to a point but the mid to late game mechanics are horrendously broken. Traffic is a hideous monster to control and if you do by some miracle manage to organised it the game is incredibly easy. The only challenge is traffic management. It feels more and more like a glorified Facebook game without the socialI am assessing this game based on my 25 hours of experience. This game is fun up to a point but the mid to late game mechanics are horrendously broken. Traffic is a hideous monster to control and if you do by some miracle manage to organised it the game is incredibly easy. The only challenge is traffic management. It feels more and more like a glorified Facebook game without the social game requirements. Region trading is horrendously broken, commuters commute but when they do the traffic is so horrendous because you only have one entrance to your city. EVEN WITH mass transit maxed out including trains and boats, it's just ridiculous. The online requirements suck too, I've lost a 9 hour city due to the servers. Also the region play is rubbish due to the servers, I was playing a region with my girlfriend (hot seat style) and I waited TEN MINUTES for the servers to update our own singleplayer region so I could send power to my girlfriends city. This is just dumb, it isn't fun. tldr: it starts out very fun but after you get over the "creativity" aspect of creating a city it becomes very boring and very broken. Might be good in a few months when it's patched although many features are not as advertised (such as "full simulation" which is a flat out lie). The DRM just makes everything worse.… Expand
  35. Necrotaur
    Mar 14, 2013
    2
    Update 3/14: Login issues seem to be fixed, but there are still major problems with this game. We all know about the forced online and small map size, but I haven't seen too many people mention the bugs. Remember how the beta was capped at 1 hour? There are TONS of issues, and most of them only become apparent after a few hours of play. I suspect the beta was less about finding andUpdate 3/14: Login issues seem to be fixed, but there are still major problems with this game. We all know about the forced online and small map size, but I haven't seen too many people mention the bugs. Remember how the beta was capped at 1 hour? There are TONS of issues, and most of them only become apparent after a few hours of play. I suspect the beta was less about finding and squashing bugs, and more about publicity. I've had every single sim become homeless for no apparent reason, hundreds of thousands of simoleans disappear from my treasury, buses and trade centers refuse to work despite there being no traffic, and power to cities going out upon logging, taking several in-game days before it decides to turn on again. The list goes on. Now, the SimCity franchise is no stranger to bugs, but these are literally game-ending because there is no save ability. There are questionable gameplay mechanics too, such as the inter-connectivity of cities, where a single 'bad' player can ruin a game, or the crippling simplicity of the transit, job and housing system. The latter has only become apparent in the last few days, and it indicates everything Maxis/EA told us about sophisticated AI and massive amounts of route calculations was a lie. Google it and see for yourself. SimCity is not a 'sim' in any sense of the word, and I can't recommend it to anyone.… Expand
  36. digixu
    Mar 14, 2013
    3
    Dont get me wrong at its core it could be a beautiful game but there is so MUCH holding it back. The always online is a kick to the knees but the killer for me is City size, 0.5km x 0.5km is just so so small and then the traffic AI is just moronic, no left turns, avoids avenues for dirt roads if there closer, ambulances dont have right of ways buses have no routes and cause jams 7Dont get me wrong at its core it could be a beautiful game but there is so MUCH holding it back. The always online is a kick to the knees but the killer for me is City size, 0.5km x 0.5km is just so so small and then the traffic AI is just moronic, no left turns, avoids avenues for dirt roads if there closer, ambulances dont have right of ways buses have no routes and cause jams 7 firetrucks for 1 small house fire while a skyscraper burns down i could go on.

    Glassbox needs a lot of work

    RCI needs fixing its too lenient and unrealistic while at the same time we are seeing 100% residential cities working with no commercial or industrial.

    Graphical its beautiful but size constraints are holding it back.

    its a good game at its core but EA have decided to bring this game out of development too soon.

    Disappointing.    … Expand
  37. Dethslayer7
    Mar 14, 2013
    2
    This game was terrible. It was a bad write-off of the old (and good) SimCity. I am very disappointed, and the fact that it has DRM makes it even worse.
  38. badman690275
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    i have been able to play for 4 days. i have had to restart several times as my regions just disapear?? there are still many broken aspects of the game no grid guides, no city border guide, firetrucks all go to same house..... even with these expensive losses the city size is the bigest lame out. if u want to play a very limited few city blocks with enormous support buildings, Good Luck toi have been able to play for 4 days. i have had to restart several times as my regions just disapear?? there are still many broken aspects of the game no grid guides, no city border guide, firetrucks all go to same house..... even with these expensive losses the city size is the bigest lame out. if u want to play a very limited few city blocks with enormous support buildings, Good Luck to ya! i cannot get past 120k popualation with only 1 industry. Ive used half my city to have the ability to build an oil refinery and still cannot reach the daily income that will unlock the building that will unlock oil refineries. My city has full oil reserves & i have pumps on every inch. The city size isnt just small, its disproportionately small. The buildings are huge. This is not a fun game… Expand
  39. Nosferatu
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    Regardless of the DRM and wait times hell even the lack of cheetah speed which I'm sure will be fixed. This is not a real SimCity it's a cut down facebook game charged at $70. You can't modify the terrain, can't even add subways, very restricted gaming space and the AI is completely clueless and very unsimulation like. EA took the SIM out of SimCity, but don't worry I'm sure theyRegardless of the DRM and wait times hell even the lack of cheetah speed which I'm sure will be fixed. This is not a real SimCity it's a cut down facebook game charged at $70. You can't modify the terrain, can't even add subways, very restricted gaming space and the AI is completely clueless and very unsimulation like. EA took the SIM out of SimCity, but don't worry I'm sure they will happily sell it back to you over time. DO NOT BUY. Think of it as an online Simcity Societies, masquerading as the game we used to love so much.… Expand
  40. malocite
    Mar 14, 2013
    0
    With the name Simcity you would expect a quality gaming experience. Sadly this is not the case with Simcity 5. Simcity 4 is a far superior game. Always on DRM is a massive pain, and to anyone who's ever played an EA game that required servers to authenticate you'll know those servers only stay on for so long. Will your game continue to play 10 years later like Simcity 4 did? Nope.With the name Simcity you would expect a quality gaming experience. Sadly this is not the case with Simcity 5. Simcity 4 is a far superior game. Always on DRM is a massive pain, and to anyone who's ever played an EA game that required servers to authenticate you'll know those servers only stay on for so long. Will your game continue to play 10 years later like Simcity 4 did? Nope. Aside from the BS of their DRM the game is massively broken. Tiny building areas are one problem as well as the complete disaster that is the sims ability to pathfind. Build a road next to an avenue and watch the road get completely clogged while the avenue is ignored completely. I might take another peak at this in a years time if they release an offline playing mode since its been proven the 'glassbox engine' doesn't actually do anything online except run drm and a leader board.… Expand
  41. eclipsemod
    Mar 14, 2013
    1
    No. Just no. This game doesn't even deserve a decent review from me. EA has ruined what should've been a great single player game with it's always online DRM.
  42. Joacimsvensson
    Mar 14, 2013
    1
    Fun concept but an un-worthy sequel that is extremly flawed and buggy. Read http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=523158 for the complete story.
  43. minijeffrey
    Mar 14, 2013
    5
    The game has one major problem: everything works and is broken at the same time. The bugs and gameplay-problems I have seen are unbelievable: from a locked time (5:40 PM) to complete broken traffic and money-systems. A realistic simulation game, failed.
  44. Jimbob2k666
    Mar 14, 2013
    5
    I'll start by saying I've had no online DRM issues with the game, although I've had to switch servers a couple of times since first playing. I've played the game now for about 30 hours, yet I seem to have become bored with it already. Realisticaly, due to the limits on city size, there is really only a couple of ways to build a successful city and the idea of starting a new one makes meI'll start by saying I've had no online DRM issues with the game, although I've had to switch servers a couple of times since first playing. I've played the game now for about 30 hours, yet I seem to have become bored with it already. Realisticaly, due to the limits on city size, there is really only a couple of ways to build a successful city and the idea of starting a new one makes me want to quit and do something else..................................... My biggest gripe is the illusion of multiplayer or it's supposed social interface. The chat box never works, I think in the whole 30 hours i've seen one person say "hello" and that's it. I've tried to type replies but these never show up anywhere. Citylog is a waste of time, zones are always full, as they are when you try to search for a game......................................Graphically it's quite nice, but I get a constant, strange flickering anomalies all the time (i have a 7950 card latest drivers etc etc). This is the only game where this occurs and it's quite annoying. I was expecting more details sims though as their appearance is like something from a game 10 years ago......................overall I give the game a 5.… Expand
  45. Squidcod
    Mar 14, 2013
    2
    Aside from the always on servers, and the emphasis on social activities over city management, Sim City has failed to provide an intelligent and long lasting simulation. There are obvious flaws that can be visibly noticed in the algorithms used, and many in-game features are unreliable and random.
  46. Dogcat
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    We were promised a great revival of the franchise. Instead we got a really casual boring game that should be rather called "sim-really-small-town". And yet it costs 80$ has a huuuuuuuuge set of bugs and has the worst kind of DRM ever. To all fans of SimCity3000 and SimCity4 I'd recommend buying CitiesXL and avoiding SimCity 5.
  47. VolRath217
    Mar 13, 2013
    3
    So yeah, launch was terrible, regardless of what some of these reviews are saying it was, in fact, worse than Diablo 3. Disregarding that however, the game, for what it is, isn't that bad. Unfortunately it also doesn't live up to not only the previous Sim City games (though I realize that this is a "relaunch" and not a sequel), but there are a lot of things that were told to us prior toSo yeah, launch was terrible, regardless of what some of these reviews are saying it was, in fact, worse than Diablo 3. Disregarding that however, the game, for what it is, isn't that bad. Unfortunately it also doesn't live up to not only the previous Sim City games (though I realize that this is a "relaunch" and not a sequel), but there are a lot of things that were told to us prior to the release that this just does not deliver.

    I have spent a lot of time in this game, I made a city with over 400,000 people in it, I filled up the map with an oil drilling city, I filled up the map with a city of almost nothing but high-density, high-wealth commercial and residential with landmarks making tons of tourist money, I made a mining city making tons of money selling alloy. Making them was great. It's too bad I can't play those last 2 now. Both of them are lost somewhere in that big, origin cloud in the sky. The only reason I'm on metacritic right now is because I just can't bring myself to make another city, pouring 10-15 hours into something that when I load it the next day it's going to tell me that it can't process correctly and then it completely disappears such that I can't even see the road connecting it when I'm in my city next door. I'l start with my list of gripes. 1) They said that people's lives were going to be simuated; they'd have names, jobs, homes. Well, that's true. They wake up in a home in the morning, you follow them to work. But keep watching. That night they go to the closest empty house, the next day someone with a different name leaves that house and goes to the closest empty job which is not the same as it was yesterday. Their "simulation" isn't simulating anything. 2) While this is a relaunch, it's missing key components from previous games. Most visibly, terraforming. There's a city in one region where you can't build anything but a 1x8 strip of road and maybe 10 houses and the rest is a giant mesa that's too steep for a road to go up. 3) The obvious part from earlier about my cities keep going missing. 4) You will run out of water. Your entire region WILL run out of water. There is nothing you can do about it. 5) I can't save my game on my PC. Now always-online doesn't bother me as long as servers are up (I haven't had a big problem with that), but I've been playing SimCity for 18 years and sometimes you just have to back up 30 minutes and start again. Plus I always enjoyed filling up a map with a giant city and then setting off all the disasters at once before I went to bed at night. When I got up, I'd reload the game and be right back where I was before the disaster. Here, you don't get that, what happens, happens. At least in WoW, which incidentally is also always online and doesn't save locally, there is nothing I can do short of deleting my toon that will completely destroy my gameplay (and I can even undo character deletion if I open a ticket). No local save Great chance of failure. 6) The city is too small. I don't care what anyone thinks, the city is too small. On every other Sim City game I always chose the largest city, why in the world would I ever want just a kinda big city or itty bitty city? I wouldn't. 7) Everything HAS to be next to a road. You can't build a residential square and put a park in the middle of it (unless you just plop a piece of road next to it as well), and you can't upgrade from a 4 lane to a divided 4 lane or move your road over 1 space (to keep in line with the rest of the city) without destroying every building along it. There's too much stuff for me to continue without saying what I like about it.

    So, what I like about it 1) I like that the roads are the pipes and the power lines. It simplifies things, but doesn't over-simplify. 2) I like how (when working) if you've built a university or fully upgraded your town hall in one city in the region, the benefits spread to the rest of the region. 3) Though I have to care about how happy everyone is, I'm glad I don't have to REALLY care about how happy they are like in SC4. 4) As I'm going over things in my head now, I realize what I like about it is the fact that it's SimCity. There's not anything in particular about this specific game that I can point out that is special and working that I like. Just building a city and watching it grow and change is the only reason I've made 4 full map cities (well, that and I keep having to start over since they keep disappearing). I could probably at this moment reinstall SC3k and not be nearly as disappointed.    … Expand
  48. jdestroyer82
    Mar 13, 2013
    2
    This game is fundamentally broken on almost all levels. AI is oversimplified and a hindrance to game advancement. Online only functionality is not worth the restrictions. Players end up with a tiny generic city that becomes more and more frustrating to grow. This game is a massive disappointment, even beyond the restrictive DRM and launch issues. This will be the last EA game I willThis game is fundamentally broken on almost all levels. AI is oversimplified and a hindrance to game advancement. Online only functionality is not worth the restrictions. Players end up with a tiny generic city that becomes more and more frustrating to grow. This game is a massive disappointment, even beyond the restrictive DRM and launch issues. This will be the last EA game I will purchase, no matter what the name of the studio they assimilate. Because, that studio is only a name. None of the original Maxis seems to exist in this product. I hope this serves as a lesson to the game industry and its consumers.… Expand
  49. jnoctis
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Someone told me EA and Maxis fixed the servers.... Lets say there were wrong. I haven't even been able to play this game yet because of the stupid connection issues. $55.00 wasted. Thanks EA for ruining another franchise.
  50. SacNutz
    Mar 13, 2013
    4
    I'm not here to rage about DRM. Yeah it sucks, but what can you do? At this point, the servers are a little unreliable but I have played 106 hours and haven't had any major issues in about 3 days now. Most of these reviews bash the DRM and always online blah blah blah, but it's not just that. The AI is beyond horrible. You start getting up to 80k population (which is tiny) and things goI'm not here to rage about DRM. Yeah it sucks, but what can you do? At this point, the servers are a little unreliable but I have played 106 hours and haven't had any major issues in about 3 days now. Most of these reviews bash the DRM and always online blah blah blah, but it's not just that. The AI is beyond horrible. You start getting up to 80k population (which is tiny) and things go from bad to worse quickly. Sims stack up and fill the streets needlessly, buses from other regions all flood into the city back to back at the same time, your freight trucks (the backbone of profit) get stuck in this traffic and your city begins to burn to the ground. The traffic and AI is not just challenging, as I first thought it was, it's just broken. It completely ruins your sense of success in building a thriving city. Sure, you can get around it with exploits and bugs like only zoning residential with some parks, or dirt access roads for trade express lanes, but it just sucks that you can't just build a big badass city and have things work right the way they should. The game is fun for a while, or if you aren't really hardcore about it, but I can't recommend it to any of my friends that have previously played the franchise. It's bad news, pick it up in the bargain bin in 6 months. Maybe they will have fixed a couple things by then.… Expand
  51. punkologist
    Mar 13, 2013
    8
    Well I only just got the game so I missed all the excitement of the server issues The always on internet requirement is still annoying though, especially as I'm moving house and will have no internet for a week! It would have got a 9 otherwise. Having said that, i do like the multiplayer aspect. I'm in a clan and we have our own region so it will be fun to pollute everyone else's citiesWell I only just got the game so I missed all the excitement of the server issues The always on internet requirement is still annoying though, especially as I'm moving house and will have no internet for a week! It would have got a 9 otherwise. Having said that, i do like the multiplayer aspect. I'm in a clan and we have our own region so it will be fun to pollute everyone else's cities :)

    The game itself is a joy to play. I thought I would hate the smaller map sizes but so far it hasn't really bothered me as much as I thought it would. The graphics are superb and it is extremely addictive.

    To get this up to a 10, all that is needed is trains (as in local trains and subways not the region ones), large maps (so you can have realistic sprawling suburbs) and the ability to play totally offline.    … Expand
  52. Dogfish
    Mar 13, 2013
    3
    I bought this game as the servers began to stabilize, hoping to have a good experience now that the game is supposed to be playable. Boy was that a mistake.

    This game is very broken right now. None of the advisers work right, telling you to zone the wrong things and build the wrong things. None of the indicators work right. I have filled my city with fire departments and hospitals, with    I bought this game as the servers began to stabilize, hoping to have a good experience now that the game is supposed to be playable. Boy was that a mistake.

    This game is very broken right now. None of the advisers work right, telling you to zone the wrong things and build the wrong things. None of the indicators work right. I have filled my city with fire departments and hospitals, with max coverage over every inch of the city. I'm still being yelled at by my Sims for not having enough fire/medical coverage. I have three police stations and I'm being yelled at about crime levels. I have two grade schools, a high school, a community college, a university, and a library... yep, I'm being yelled at for not having any education. I have plenty of citizens and plenty of jobs, but the citizens complain about unemployment and the businesses complain about no workers. The search function to find a region to play in does not work. This game is horribly horribly broken and I am going to seek a refund immediately. Please do not waste your money!    … Expand
  53. Alphabrava
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Let me state before you read this review that I have not been able to play this game. I want to play this game. I was ready to purchase and had been awaiting release until I found out about the always online DRM. Now I can't buy it because I can't play it in many areas that I travel to. I find Sim City 4 a good escape and a continuing puzzle for me to solve whilst i am on the road. AnLet me state before you read this review that I have not been able to play this game. I want to play this game. I was ready to purchase and had been awaiting release until I found out about the always online DRM. Now I can't buy it because I can't play it in many areas that I travel to. I find Sim City 4 a good escape and a continuing puzzle for me to solve whilst i am on the road. An upgrade would have meant hours of boredom in hotels eleviated whilst I work away. But alas no EA not only wants my money it wants to get into my house and start controling where I can be and when I can play thisis no good. Therefore i have to score zero.… Expand
  54. Teckademics
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Trash, EA should learn a lesson to listen to the consumers. Servers a horrible even after they fixed them. Game is buggy and featureless. I'll never bu another EA game again. And that's a shame because I was looking forward to battlefield 4. Just save your self the over priced asking price and use the $60 to buy Tropico 3, 4 and all the dlc along with cities xl 2013 for about $30 if youTrash, EA should learn a lesson to listen to the consumers. Servers a horrible even after they fixed them. Game is buggy and featureless. I'll never bu another EA game again. And that's a shame because I was looking forward to battlefield 4. Just save your self the over priced asking price and use the $60 to buy Tropico 3, 4 and all the dlc along with cities xl 2013 for about $30 if you want a city simulator.… Expand
  55. Jproc
    Mar 13, 2013
    1
    I will be generous and give this game 1 point because it could possibly be a good game if it somehow happened to work properly. I seriously have had more issues with this game than any other game I've played in my 20+ years of gaming. In the beginning the servers were overcrowded to the point that you couldn't even play the game. And, even if you could play, all progress was sure to beI will be generous and give this game 1 point because it could possibly be a good game if it somehow happened to work properly. I seriously have had more issues with this game than any other game I've played in my 20+ years of gaming. In the beginning the servers were overcrowded to the point that you couldn't even play the game. And, even if you could play, all progress was sure to be lost because it would fail to upload your game to cloud. After they added more servers the game started working properly for about a day, then many more bugs started to pop up. As of now, out of all of the regions to choose from, I'm only able to find one region type to play on publicly and that is Titan Gorge. It's frustrated me so much that I've decided to return or hopefully sell the game to someone (for a loss of course) after all the problems I've been required to face. I recommend anyone out there that does not like being robbed or swindled out of their hard earned money to refrain from buying this game. You will literally feel nothing more than absolute disappointment if you choose to spend money on this pile of doo doo. Please recall that the score of 1 that I give this game is a very generous score considering all circumstances.… Expand
  56. lanman61
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    SimCity is at its heart a single player game. For greedy EA to force always-on DRM on this franchise is frankly unforgiveable. When popularity of the servers goes down EA will pull the plug and your access to the game will be forever gone. Also gone are my ability to manage my own saves so out the window also goes the ability to experiment with your cities without permanently destroyingSimCity is at its heart a single player game. For greedy EA to force always-on DRM on this franchise is frankly unforgiveable. When popularity of the servers goes down EA will pull the plug and your access to the game will be forever gone. Also gone are my ability to manage my own saves so out the window also goes the ability to experiment with your cities without permanently destroying your creations. The city size limits are abysmally small and are not compensated by connecting several of these small towns together. Not only are the cites small but the locations are fixed and unchangeable another very bad move. On top of all that terraforming has also been completely removed from the game. Now I can't shape the land to form my masterpiece. It feels like EA has killed my favorite city building game and replaced it with a cheap facebook imposter.… Expand
  57. Soulgraph
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Never support forced online DRM. It makes me sick that EA thinks it can shove this always-on DRM into the game but why not it worked for Diablow. I can't believe anyone would support this behaviour, there should be 0 positive reviews on this page.
  58. SPAZZx7
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Compared to the depth of the former franchise, this is complete trash. But dont get me wrong, looks fabulous, random events frequent and less than properly animated. Online required to play? Must admit, i would give this a 3, then i see a 10 rating and nearly vomit all across my new desktop. Cant let that bowl of mindless sewage go unchallenged. Online required to play? Lets blow 100Compared to the depth of the former franchise, this is complete trash. But dont get me wrong, looks fabulous, random events frequent and less than properly animated. Online required to play? Must admit, i would give this a 3, then i see a 10 rating and nearly vomit all across my new desktop. Cant let that bowl of mindless sewage go unchallenged. Online required to play? Lets blow 100 bucks after dlc on a game that will only be around less than a year.
    *Opens original box to Sim City 2000* Yea, this still works and its at least 6 years old.

    With the amount of DLC available on launch, this game should be free to play at the least.

    How many game series can EA ruin before customers demand salvation? We wont find out...
    Because they will be lining there pockets while we rage behind there curtain of false advertisement.

    (Second review, first was a bit sloppy)    … Expand
  59. TheGamer31
    Mar 13, 2013
    2
    This game is not bad! Sure, the always online DRM is awful and very annoying considering my internet clunks out every once in a while, and it doesn't save on to your computer, but other than that it is not bad. It is a very addicting game.
  60. Skawn
    Mar 13, 2013
    2
    A fun city builder with lofty ideas of having several cities working together. Fun to play as one city but you quickly need to expand and specialise and here the game just falls apart. Servers frequently refuse to sync your cities meaning although one has surplus power and the other has surplus water they won't buy from each other. The AI is hilariously bad, pathfinding is moreA fun city builder with lofty ideas of having several cities working together. Fun to play as one city but you quickly need to expand and specialise and here the game just falls apart. Servers frequently refuse to sync your cities meaning although one has surplus power and the other has surplus water they won't buy from each other. The AI is hilariously bad, pathfinding is more reminiscent of an 80's game than a modern sim. Will review my score in a month!… Expand
  61. fragoff
    Mar 13, 2013
    10
    OK so the game wasn't available for a couple of days and yes it has always on DRM (yawn) but do not be deceived, this is a spectacular offering from Maxis. Gameplay tweaked to within an inch of it's life, graphics stunning, plenty of that famous Maxis humour what else could you ask for. £50 is a steal for a game of this quality especially when you look at some of the so called AAA tripeOK so the game wasn't available for a couple of days and yes it has always on DRM (yawn) but do not be deceived, this is a spectacular offering from Maxis. Gameplay tweaked to within an inch of it's life, graphics stunning, plenty of that famous Maxis humour what else could you ask for. £50 is a steal for a game of this quality especially when you look at some of the so called AAA tripe that is wheeled out (that's right SH3 I'm looking at you in particular) 1 small gripe, the maps are too small but when you get used to the new region concept it doesn't seem quite as bad. All in all if you like SimCity this is a must don't let the false score due to DRM gripes put you off.… Expand
  62. MacrosTheBlack
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Things I've run into:

    1) Constant server connection issues 2) CIty sometimes not saved 3) Schools completely empty despite sims complaining they want to go to school 4) Sometimes can't export goods, it just sits there in a depot 5) Sudden and extreme drops in budget 6) Giant stalagmites rising out of the ground (no joke) 7) 10 firetrucks all going to the same fire, but ignoring    Things I've run into:

    1) Constant server connection issues
    2) CIty sometimes not saved
    3) Schools completely empty despite sims complaining they want to go to school
    4) Sometimes can't export goods, it just sits there in a depot
    5) Sudden and extreme drops in budget
    6) Giant stalagmites rising out of the ground (no joke)
    7) 10 firetrucks all going to the same fire, but ignoring the other ones. This also happens for other vehicles.
    8) etc. etc etc.

    These are just bugs, apart from this, the multiplayer is absolutely broken as there is barely any real interaction, the group chat doesn't work usually and the city sizes are terrible. I feel comfortable saying that this product probably shouldn't have been released until it was actually done. Thanks for ****ing up the franchise!    … Expand
  63. wh1ps3r
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    This release absolutely failed. Everything is bugged. I wonder, why other critics talking about, how game is so cool balanced, It's all a big lie. Problem is, you can build city without industry zone without any problem You don't have to even build commercial zones!!! How it's possible, they give it 100?

    Anyway, i rated 0.
  64. 3ch3l0n
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Again a crappy game from EA, which was elected as worst company in the USA.
    They ended up even above tobacco- and arms manufacturers.
    After ruining Fifa and Battlefield 3 with bugs, DRM crap and payable DLC... this is just the next game being wiped out by EA. NEVER have I ever given any game a straight zero. But spend so much money on a game you expect it to work. And if it's not    Again a crappy game from EA, which was elected as worst company in the USA.
    They ended up even above tobacco- and arms manufacturers.
    After ruining Fifa and Battlefield 3 with bugs, DRM crap and payable DLC... this is just the next game being wiped out by EA.
    NEVER have I ever given any game a straight zero. But spend so much money on a game you expect it to work. And if it's not working because of a total despicable feature like the obligation to be always online... that's just humiliating and not worth spending 1 buck to it.    … Expand
  65. isitaspider
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    If you want to play a game for several hours, only to have your city go from 4k an hour in the black to 5k in the red all because the game has several serious bugs, and then to watch as your city goes bankrupt right before your eyes, then this is the game for you! Filled with required online-only DRM, even for single player, making it that you can't play this game when their servers areIf you want to play a game for several hours, only to have your city go from 4k an hour in the black to 5k in the red all because the game has several serious bugs, and then to watch as your city goes bankrupt right before your eyes, then this is the game for you! Filled with required online-only DRM, even for single player, making it that you can't play this game when their servers are down, or taken offline, for your convenience. Watch as you produce an overabundance of electricity and water while half your city leaves because the game won't update your power distribution in any reasonable amount of time. Seriously, this game is trash with all the bugs and online-only DRM. Don't buy it until they make it offline.… Expand
  66. woodruff
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Besindes the server problems and all, don't people see that EA makes fun of us all? They want to sell us a game with features it doesn't have at all.

    Look: http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060 There are no Sims living in your town. They are just mindless bots, going to the next free house    Besindes the server problems and all, don't people see that EA makes fun of us all? They want to sell us a game with features it doesn't have at all.

    Look:
    http://answers.ea.com/t5/Miscellaneous-Issues/Traffic-quot-AI-quot-This-is-why-services-and-traffic-are-broken/m-p/737060#U737060

    There are no Sims living in your town. They are just mindless bots, going to the next free house and the next free shop and the next free working place. And this is why this game has so much flaws. Traffic jams, empty shops and casinos altough everything is full.

    If you build a car lot besides a casino, no sim will go into the casino. They will take the bus to the next free shop. This game is mindless like any other EA games of the early past. Don't buy this stuff.    … Expand
  67. Flight
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Game is totally and utterly broken. I don't think they can fix it.

    Code on your PC is open. They actually call the variable representing your population 'FudgedPopulation'.
  68. Korsferd
    Mar 13, 2013
    1
    This game is a error! I dont understand why someone would buy an abomination like simcity when there is CITY XL as an alternative. I dont get why people persist in keep pay for sofhouses like EA who dont give a for his customer and continualy launches horrible games like this. I dont have buyed this game, cause I refuse to pay for a game with DRM, but other keep funding craps likeThis game is a error! I dont understand why someone would buy an abomination like simcity when there is CITY XL as an alternative. I dont get why people persist in keep pay for sofhouses like EA who dont give a for his customer and continualy launches horrible games like this. I dont have buyed this game, cause I refuse to pay for a game with DRM, but other keep funding craps like simcity!
    Why complain, you all deserve this    … Expand
  69. Scritty
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    The main point isn't even the DRM. It's the fact that the logic of the game in so many areas JUST DOESN'T WORK. Simoleons are lost, weird limits placed on buying energy or shipping waste or whatever, shops restocking with no need of industry (and no other players and at ZERO cost to your "mini city" People leaving work from home" A" and returning to a completely different house.. HomeThe main point isn't even the DRM. It's the fact that the logic of the game in so many areas JUST DOESN'T WORK. Simoleons are lost, weird limits placed on buying energy or shipping waste or whatever, shops restocking with no need of industry (and no other players and at ZERO cost to your "mini city" People leaving work from home" A" and returning to a completely different house.. Home "B" and then repeating this randomly every day, pathfinding for traffic terrible. Waste not clearing, cash limits "sticking". The logic of the game is just plain BROKEN all over the place. The list could go on and on and on. For the first 90 minutes you are thinking
    "This is a good game. Looks good, if the servers OK I'm going to enjoy this"... Then WHAM the logic somewhere trips you up and often it's a game ending error. Nothing to do with servers or online logic issues these are pure and simple game logic errors and LOTS OF THEM. As for online multiplay. Sharing a zone is a nightmare without some sort of "mind control" over your fellow players.
    Everyone has to build at the same rate for this to work. and display co-ordination and co-operatiion over the long term consistent communication and really playing "one way" that would need to be pre decided before the game begins. It almost requires separate coms software and tracking to get this to work even then, if a player stops playing, wants to experiment, or comes across a problem and doesn't communicate quickly your own "city" (tiny village) is most likely on a downward spiral to collapse as a result. And this happens...every game.

    Rely on someone to provide your power? Well make sure he or she is playing and expanding at about the same rate and at the same time as you or BAM it goes out of the window. Same with waste same with EVERYTHING. You need almost superhuman co-ordination to get a 15 player map to any decent level using multiplayer. It's darn hard with 3!

    Then you realize why goods appear from no-where at zero cost. Maxis knew the game logic was bust and hid 1/3rd of the issue by making these phantom products for "C" districts to sell. But didn't apply the same "bodge" fixes to "I" or "R" (perhaps becasue that would have let the cat out of the bag too early as far as botched game mechanics go)

    For me the idea of global market multiplayer seems quite atractive. I would go online for that for sure. It WOULD bring a new facet to the game. I would hope it was optional. But that is academic. It doesn't work and it's not just a "little bit" broke go deep enough into any facet of the game and it will unravel into a mess of faulty logic and counter intuitive reactions from your Sims. My two pence worth is Maxis "shoe horned" multiplayer functionality in sometime mid 2012 to justify always online DRM. And botched the logic..BADLY. I'd like to say probably at the request of EA but I have no idea whether that would be true or not.

    The sad thing is all of this worked (and still does) with Sim City 4. A ten year old game that works almost flawlessly to this day and is what I'm playing on my other monitor as I type this.    … Expand
  70. Jack91
    Mar 13, 2013
    5
    Just got the game after most of the original problems seem to be fixed, a few disconnections from the main servers a few times but eventually restored. The worst thing I found is the big price they are charging yet it didn't take me long to complete most of it. The zone you get is simply too small and you have to cram so much into one square it's ridiculous. Fun to play but does not lastJust got the game after most of the original problems seem to be fixed, a few disconnections from the main servers a few times but eventually restored. The worst thing I found is the big price they are charging yet it didn't take me long to complete most of it. The zone you get is simply too small and you have to cram so much into one square it's ridiculous. Fun to play but does not last long and by far not worth the price tag that comes with it.… Expand
  71. MythWaker
    Mar 13, 2013
    9
    Never written a review on here but feel this is worth it!! Ignore the 0 marks as this game is far from it. Let me put it in perspective came home from work at 4pm, loaded this game up and could not pull myself away for 8 Hours straight it was that good! Yes the cities are not as big as before but you soon forget that as the game is so deep and addictive. (EA have said bigger cities areNever written a review on here but feel this is worth it!! Ignore the 0 marks as this game is far from it. Let me put it in perspective came home from work at 4pm, loaded this game up and could not pull myself away for 8 Hours straight it was that good! Yes the cities are not as big as before but you soon forget that as the game is so deep and addictive. (EA have said bigger cities are coming, DLC no doubt) This game is gorgeous to look at and everything runs smoothly. Coming from a sim city background it didn’t take me long to pick up the basics and all these reviews saying you will fail on your first attempt I don’t think so! I found as long as you follow the basics everything falls into place start small and work your way up to big.
    The only issue and why I gave it a 9 is that I had to wait an hour when I installed the game before I could play due to the updates that were needed to patch onto the game and I don’t really like the whole Origin thing, but once you’re playing you soon forget.
    Buy this game you will not be disappointed I can already feel months of my life slipping away to this game its that good!!    … Expand
  72. Sir_Trigg
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Seriously, don't buy this game. At least, not until they fix everything. The constant online DRM has crippled the game so people who bought it can't even play. The main thing I bought it for was to play with friends but the server list splits you up from them. Even if you change server, you can't keep the maps you already made! Most servers are 'closed' so you either have to hope peopleSeriously, don't buy this game. At least, not until they fix everything. The constant online DRM has crippled the game so people who bought it can't even play. The main thing I bought it for was to play with friends but the server list splits you up from them. Even if you change server, you can't keep the maps you already made! Most servers are 'closed' so you either have to hope people will abandon all their work and join or play by yourself/with random people online. Even if you do manage to get on a server and log in, it still won't let you load maps up! I tried playing for a little bit before work and I can't get on either of my two maps to play. This game is a joke. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun when I could actually play it. By making sure no one pirates the game, they are screwing over the ones who want to legitimately pay and play the game. I've learnt my lesson, sorry EA but we're over. Don't call 'cause I won't answer.… Expand
  73. PRFR
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    SimCity is the biggest scam in recent gaming history. http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a5pof/did_ea_lie_about_theoretical_population_sizes/
  74. abbadox
    Mar 13, 2013
    0
    Why are they still selling a broken game, they should stop selling copies of this broken game and fix the server problems, allow people to play offline, and increase the city size. If they solve these issues then start selling the game again. If not then they should refund everyone that paid for a copy of the game and resign from the game making business. This is the worst launch of aWhy are they still selling a broken game, they should stop selling copies of this broken game and fix the server problems, allow people to play offline, and increase the city size. If they solve these issues then start selling the game again. If not then they should refund everyone that paid for a copy of the game and resign from the game making business. This is the worst launch of a video game in recent history and everyone saw in coming except for the development team or they just did not care. I am a long long time fan of simcity games and this is the first one I HATE.… Expand
  75. MrAnt
    Mar 12, 2013
    1
    massive screwup from EA and Maxis. First the servers were screwed, then after playing for about 20hrs each of my cities ends up bugged and I cant play them anymore. Never again will I preorder a EA game. Such a shame this had so much potential...
  76. luck
    Mar 12, 2013
    5
    I preordered this game when it was announced last year. I am very disappointed. All they need to do was update and add features to Simcity 4. I will say the somethings. I hate you have to be online to play. This is the type of game i would just open to kill time, because you can quit anytime. The cities are small and limited. I have no interest in multiplayer. So the small citiesI preordered this game when it was announced last year. I am very disappointed. All they need to do was update and add features to Simcity 4. I will say the somethings. I hate you have to be online to play. This is the type of game i would just open to kill time, because you can quit anytime. The cities are small and limited. I have no interest in multiplayer. So the small cities are limited. The concept could work, but let us decide how they are connected and merge into each other.

    I miss terrain editor. I will still get enjoyment out of playing this game, but it makes me want to just turn on Simcity 4.    … Expand
  77. exmachina64
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    1) Always online DRM.
    2) Small city sizes to run on low spec PCs.
    3) Population padding (your population is actually much smaller than the number you see in the game).
    4) The simulation is fundamentally broken (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=523158).
  78. dpofs10
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Wow, a week after launch and the servers still don't work. Just got kicked out and lost 2 hours work and can't sign back on at all. PLEASE don't make the mistake I did and give this company your money for a defective by design product.
  79. ohrolly
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    This isn't a "game". It is a $60 paperweight that comes in a nice fancy box. That is all there is to it. This is what happens when developers force us to constantly be online for a single player game. Several days we cannot play, and this issue probably wont resolve itself for a while. Also, suppose 5 or 10 years down the line we want to play simcity, do we get to? are your servers goingThis isn't a "game". It is a $60 paperweight that comes in a nice fancy box. That is all there is to it. This is what happens when developers force us to constantly be online for a single player game. Several days we cannot play, and this issue probably wont resolve itself for a while. Also, suppose 5 or 10 years down the line we want to play simcity, do we get to? are your servers going to remain up for that long? possibly even longer? For people who bought this game, let this be a lesson, do NOT support developers that force DRM onto single player games, don't buy another EA game, and when their wallets get lighter, they will listen. These greedy bastards listen to their quarterly reports, not their customers.… Expand
  80. bogbog
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Even if this were the greatest game in the history of creation (which it's not), it still wouldn't make sense to cripple the user experience by forcing them to always be online to play. That's pure garbage. Buy this game and you support publishers letting you play the game YOU purchased at THEIR discretion. Don't buy this game.
  81. kwopper
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    And yet another reason why DRM is a failed concept. Too bad though, despite my already negative opinion of EA, i might have probably bought this game sometime in the future. Instead of making quality games more affordable and accessible, EA's idea of fighting piracy is to make the game unplayable as a whole. You people could learn a thing or two from valve, since most of us have several,And yet another reason why DRM is a failed concept. Too bad though, despite my already negative opinion of EA, i might have probably bought this game sometime in the future. Instead of making quality games more affordable and accessible, EA's idea of fighting piracy is to make the game unplayable as a whole. You people could learn a thing or two from valve, since most of us have several, if not dozens of games installed on steam, all purchased legally. Another sad thing is that while this is happening, EA just started pulling more features from simcity as a way to make ammends for this god awful failure. I think we will all be expecting these features pulled to be released in a DLC for 19.99 later on in the future...… Expand
  82. julioazcam
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Aside from all the server problems, the stupidly implemented DRM always online for a single player game etc etc ...

    In contrast with other iterations of the game, this SimCity maxes out. There are no long term objectives you might have. You can max out your city in 4 hours, create another one, max it out in another 4 hours ad infinitum. Whereas you could spend months tweaking your    Aside from all the server problems, the stupidly implemented DRM always online for a single player game etc etc ...

    In contrast with other iterations of the game, this SimCity maxes out. There are no long term objectives you might have. You can max out your city in 4 hours, create another one, max it out in another 4 hours ad infinitum.

    Whereas you could spend months tweaking your cities in other versions, the replay value of this title gets old and boring REALLY fast & it all has to do with the size of the cities. It's a fantastic casual game (blah), not a full fledged SimCity like you were used to.    … Expand
  83. OmegaNine
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    After trying to play this game for days, I gave up. This is the problem with EA, they cripple games so much that they are totally unusable. I remember thinking "I should not support EA", but I was so looking forward to a SimCity reboot that I didn't care. Turns out that I should have trusted my gut. This was a total waste of money.
  84. Vihazur
    Mar 12, 2013
    5
    I think a huge part of the problem with making it multiplayer is that they didn't make it multiplayer enough, to be worth all the crap players have to put up with, for it. I mean, they could have made a really unique game, where players have all sorts of tools to customize their cities, earn revenue from other players visiting their cities, all sorts of stuff.. but just some resourceI think a huge part of the problem with making it multiplayer is that they didn't make it multiplayer enough, to be worth all the crap players have to put up with, for it. I mean, they could have made a really unique game, where players have all sorts of tools to customize their cities, earn revenue from other players visiting their cities, all sorts of stuff.. but just some resource trading? That alone is supposed to justify the online requirement? (LINE-BREAK) It still feels like a largely single-player experience, so all these issues its having, including the design sacrifices they had to make, like small city sizes, just feel like a needless crippling of what could have been a decent, modernized, but rather stock formula city builder. (LINE-BREAK) They could have done something uniquely ambitious with the multiplayer, they could have made it optional, or they could have just stuck with the tried and true single-player experience but instead, they didn't do either. It's just another city builder, unique for how they've had to gut it, rather than for anything new they've brought to the genre.… Expand
  85. KalanYamato
    Mar 12, 2013
    2
    Haha, oh wow, my god, it hurts me so much to see this actually happening.
    Well, that was the last straw. I already made the mistake of buying HP2010 and BF3, I won't repeat it.
  86. milesa360
    Mar 12, 2013
    2
    I originally reviewed this game on day two after the North American release. I rated it 7 out of 10. I am changing my review to a 2 out of 10.

    When I first reviewed the game, there were serious server issues. While they are still lingering, and servers are constantly coming down and back up daily, the game is now at least playable for an extended amount of time. In my original    I originally reviewed this game on day two after the North American release. I rated it 7 out of 10. I am changing my review to a 2 out of 10.

    When I first reviewed the game, there were serious server issues. While they are still lingering, and servers are constantly coming down and back up daily, the game is now at least playable for an extended amount of time. In my original review, I praised the graphics, interface, deep simulation, and the way they mesh together. I stand by my assessment of the graphics and interface. However, upon playing the game uninterrupted for several hours, as well as doing number crunching, and reading other accounts of people doing the same kinds of observations I have been, I've come to the conclusion that the simulation is not nearly as deep as it appears. One of the great features touted by the developers in this game was the 'GlassBox' engine, which supposedly has literally thousands of 'sims' (citizens of your city) being simulated on the EA servers, which allows a realistic and complex city to emerge on your screen without users needing to own a supercomputer. This conveniently provided their rationale for requiring a constant connection to their servers at all times even while playing single player. This is manifestly false. You can physically disconnect your internet from your computer while playing and the supposedly server-side simulation continues to hum along without a hitch. My complaint here is not about the requirement of the internet connection (though there are many reasons to dislike it), but by the completely invented reasoning behind its inclusion.

    In addition to this complaint, there are an entire host of client-side issues which are either bugs, or simply non-features to begin with. The supposedly intelligent traffic system in which "everyone has a home and a workplace unless unemployed", is also false. The "simulation" does not simulate actions of the sims, it simply spawns cars and moves them around in a fashion which would *appear* to show a collection of individual behaviors. Essentially, it "simulates" the simulation. The same can be said for the industrial system, in which supposedly residents work and produce goods, which are then shipped off to businesses to be sold to citizens that made money working & producing other goods. This is also false. Despite showing lots of big numbers when you look at your population statistics regarding "shipped freight", "goods sold" etc, these are essentially arbitrary numbers based on the population of your city (which also over time becomes greatly inflated compared to the number of actual "sims" visible moving about your city) and the makeup of your zones which you have placed. The businesses do not recieve shipments from industry, they restock automatically at the beginning of each game day, regardless of the availability of goods either in your city or your region. It is entirely possible and workable to have a city with zero industry and only residents and shops, with no imports, exports, or production, but the city will "thrive" on. In short, the much touted "depth" of simulation is a complete sham. The real achievement by Maxis is the ability of the game to pull the wool over your eyes and show you what purports to be a much more realistic and complex simulation than previous SimCity titles when in fact, the game is far simpler, less realistic, more limited, and worst of all, dysfunctional to the core.    … Expand
  87. JTenebrous
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    As a fan of Maxis games since ~1988, and an excited follower of preview news leading up to the release of Simcity 5, I'll be reviewing this game based on my long-anticipated Day 1 gameplay experience: 0. 0, because I didn't buy it. 0, because I'm boycotting EA's latest in a long, colourful history of taking the complete piss of its customers and employees. 0, because I love SimCity, butAs a fan of Maxis games since ~1988, and an excited follower of preview news leading up to the release of Simcity 5, I'll be reviewing this game based on my long-anticipated Day 1 gameplay experience: 0. 0, because I didn't buy it. 0, because I'm boycotting EA's latest in a long, colourful history of taking the complete piss of its customers and employees. 0, because I love SimCity, but I am NOT going to be subjected to Always-Online DRM for single-player games, by EA or any other company in the industry. Decisions like this are terrible for the consumers and terrible for the industry I make games for a living, too, and my heart goes out to all the brilliant creative individuals who will have worked very hard on this game, only to have some money-filching, good-for-nothing corporate suits pull a stunt that would take all that effort and turn it into a product that's currently pulling a much-deserved 1.7 consumer rating on metacritic. And to top it all off, those same suits will now be pointing fingers and eyeing up the developers for deep budget cuts... which I sadly expect to be reading about on a respected gaming review site in a few months.

    Shame on EA! And, apparently, EA honestly believes that some of us will buy their latest false claims that SimCity NEEDS the always-online DRM because the game “offloads a significant amount of the calculations to our servers”, and that it would take “a significant amount of engineering work from our team to rewrite the game” for single player. They obviously think we're all mouth-breathers! I have a latest-gen Intel i7 processor and 16gb ram I don't need their sodding "cloud" to "reticulate my splines", and for that matter, neither would my 3 year old laptop. They may be "offloading calculations" (including the algorithms for ethics and consumer rights) but they better "onload" those calculations back to local hardware like every other game, on the double, or I'll offload some calculations of my own, such as where their games get any consideration with respect to my wallet.

    Poor show, EA.    … Expand
  88. Invain
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Worst simcity game ever. I dont care about DRM but this game feels INCOMPLATE, CLOSED BETA or browser game. I'm so regret my decision to buy this crap.
  89. Foam
    Mar 12, 2013
    3
    As many others have stated, this could have been a great game. The developer (Maxis) and publisher (EA) had probably from the beginning planned for always-online DRM. That is, in order to play the game by yourself you must have a constant secure connection to EA's server. This puts you at the mercy of EA's hardware & IT team, something that is beyond yourAs many others have stated, this could have been a great game. The developer (Maxis) and publisher (EA) had probably from the beginning planned for always-online DRM. That is, in order to play the game by yourself you must have a constant secure connection to EA's server. This puts you at the mercy of EA's hardware & IT team, something that is beyond your control.---------------------------------------------------

    Released on March 5th, it is now late afternoon March 12th and there are still major server issues. I am currently on West Coast 4 and am getting long que times trying to join, and it isn't even peak hours on the west coast. I can only assume the load will increase as most people get off work and arrive home in the next hour or two.--------------------------------------------------------

    SimCity has traditionally been a single player game many people like to play around in for hundreds of real time hours. Since SimCity is "always multiplayer", in order to play by ones self you must create a region and set it to "Private" mode where only you or invited friends can join. The whole idea of that is counter-intuitive in the fullest. Instead of a traditional "Single Player" and "Multiplayer" button on the main menu that has worked for decades, Maxis forces you to click "Play" and enter the multiplayer screen. Someone not that initiated into how games work will find it frustrating to start a singleplayer game even though the "single player" is technically classified as private multiplayer.----------------------------------------

    Maxis & EA are in full damage control public relations mode, all cheery smiles and apologies. Sadly, a large portion of the previously angry customer-base was easily bought with the offer of a free game. Instead of bombarding EA & Maxis with thousands of angry letters & emails demanding the removal of Online DRM and "Always multiplayer" nature of SimCity, they instead were bought off for around $60 and are now towing the line. They seem to think that companies releasing unfinished or highly flawed/untested products is A-ok, as long as they "pinky swear" to fix the game which the timeframe is never admitted. It could be 1 month or even two months before a game is fixed, but there will still be that large group of customers with unyielding blind faith, always ready to defend the happy, cheery gaming company that just recieved 60+ dollars from them for a buggy, non-working product.----------------------------- If you are wondering why game developers and publishers are getting away with extremely sloppy business practices, you need only look at the modern gamer. The customers are the problem because they do not vote with their wallets and protest in writing.--------------------------When you buy a new car, it usually comes with some kind of warranty. If your transmission for example blows seconds after your off the lot, they will replace it for free immediately. Conversely, you expect the car to be 100% working properly and built correctly when you buy it, and every car manufacturer does everything possible to make sure that happens long before you fork over the cash. The same MUST be true for all products or services. Mistakes do happen, but things of the magnitude of SimCity do not just happen accidentally. Someone somewhere made the decision that lower costs were more worth it than a working game. There will likely be bugs on all release of games, but we have the right to demand that their game work properly. In SimCity's case, it does not even work at all.-------------- Don't believe the public relations spin and the attempt to buy your sympathy and loyalty back. If you have any principles at all, for god sakes please make your integrity one of them. Show EA/Maxis that no, you cannot be simply be bought for $60. Demand they remove Online DRM, demand a deserved true Single Player, among various other small things.------ I rated this a 3 out of 10, only because in the extremely short time I have played the actual game, it is well done. Probably the biggest sadness of all is that underneath these unacceptable business practices, a good development team has produced a pretty awesome game.    … Expand
  90. serc
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    The game has a lot of problems. Only one of them actually matters. Never support always online DRM for a single player game. Lots of people cannot play their single player game because of this and gamers need to do everything they can to stop developers from including it.
  91. lolzorz
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    I'm not even going to bother reviewing this game as EA already have had an ear full of complaints which are all the same things. Why remove transport options, make the map size smaller, add always online DRM? As well as this, so many other bad features have been implemented, and i'm glad the release was a massive pile of steaming bulls*** because EA may now sort things out.
  92. RobertsonG
    Mar 12, 2013
    1
    While not a "complete" waste of time, the latest version of SimCity is definitely not worth whatever Electronic Arts is asking for it. The "always-online" DRM requirement alone is a deal breaker. When you add to that the extremely limited city size and the severe reduction of the open-ended experience that characterised previous versions, I would not recommend the game even if it wereWhile not a "complete" waste of time, the latest version of SimCity is definitely not worth whatever Electronic Arts is asking for it. The "always-online" DRM requirement alone is a deal breaker. When you add to that the extremely limited city size and the severe reduction of the open-ended experience that characterised previous versions, I would not recommend the game even if it were free. It looks like Civitas (find it on Kickstarter) is going to represent the future of city simulations. Do not waste your time or money on the 2013 SimCity.… Expand
  93. wrtworthy
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    I am still in shock about what they have done to the franchise and I feel that I have been ripped off! Stick with Sim City 4. I think the game should be called Simt own
  94. Styrkyr
    Mar 12, 2013
    2
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. The Good: Simcity has very good graphics. The data overlays are beautiful. Construction looks realistic. Nonrenewable resources add a new and interesting flavor to the game. Multiplayer regions with multiple cities online add a new and very fun flavor. There are new disasters which look and play realistically, have unexpected effects on your city. You can now build curving roads and road/road overpasses. Roads now govern your buildings density. There is a good selection of different buildings. The Bad: -Serverside
    Always-Online DRM means that you have to have a stable internet connection; the slightest hiccup in your internet will result in the game crashing and you losing hours of game play. The servers are horrible; most of them are either "busy" or "full", meaning that you can't play at all. They also crash often. Server capacity is abysmal. There is no "offline" option for single player games. All saves must be synced with EA's cloud servers; you cannot have any local saves on your hard drive. -Clientside
    Buildings often look half finished and devoid of color or decoration; it is clear that this was an unfinished product that was rushed out. City sizes are limited to approx. 2km x 2km; slightly smaller then the smallest map size on Simcity 4. Buildings cannot be placed anywhere where they are not adjacent to a road; you can no longer fill in the interior of city blocks with parks/etc. Some graphics appear half finished, i.e. grass showing through a road, dirt overlapping on a road, or jagged/flickering graphics. The game is slow to respond to neighbor deals, such as sending power or sewage to a neighbor. Parks look like they're made with astroturf. Waves/beaches look unrealistic. Zones are aligned on a road and cannot be expanded to show the entire zone; this makes planning for city blocks very difficult. There is no subway, elevated rail, monorail, or highways available to be built. Agriculture/farms have been completely removed from the game. It was not designed to be compatible with player-designed mods. Overall:
    This game had the potential to be something great, to be a truly awesome game. But with the forced DRM limitations EA has imposed on us, as well as the horrifying state of their servers, this game has become yet another destined for the bookshelf. Maxis outdid itself with bringing new ideas, concepts, and operations into the game, but with the client-side limitations such as city sizes and lack of transportation options, not to mention the server-side DRM, the game is effectively crippled. Bluntly, I can not recommend this game to anyone. One can only hope that EA will listed to the community and fix what is wrong.

    Pentium Core i7 4.2 ghz OC
    32gb DDR-3 Kingston HyperX RAM
    3 x EVGA GTX 680 2gb SLI'd
    OCZ Octane 1tb SSD    … Expand
  95. StellaDrinker
    Mar 12, 2013
    2
    Connection Issues
    -----------------
    No problems getting into the game at all although it does lose connection to the servers fairly regularly. While this doesn't prevent gameplay you are forced to keep the game running because if you quit the game before it reconnects the you will lose your progress since the last save. Having said that it did take two days before the 'buy' button on    Connection Issues
    -----------------
    No problems getting into the game at all although it does lose connection to the servers fairly regularly. While this doesn't prevent gameplay you are forced to keep the game running because if you quit the game before it reconnects the you will lose your progress since the last save.

    Having said that it did take two days before the 'buy' button on the website worked without giving a 'server error'

    Saved Games
    -----------
    I'm not aware of any indication of when it actualy saves the game. But it does often fail to do so meaning you have to redo your work again when you next login.

    Map Size
    --------
    I agree map sizes are way to small. To the extent it limits creativity and in my experience pushes you to playing each map in the same way. I do wonder if the beta was limited to 1 hour to avoid people realising this.

    Game speed
    -------------
    Currently the game is limited to a max speed of 24 minutes per game day. This is quite important as it happens. If you play the game like I prefer to, start slow and build my city then you will spend many many hours just waiting for your cash to increase enough for your next purchase.
    On the other hand you can take the other approach (the one I feel you are forced to take) spam the entire map with residential and commercial with just enough industry and ignore all but the vital services (ie water and power). Then sit back and wait until you have lots of cash, demolish your city and build it how you wanted it in the first place. Either way there is a lot of waiting around doing nothing.

    Power and Water system
    ----------------------
    I actually like this aspect of the game, I didn't enjoy having to lay all the pipes and powerlines, too much micromanagement for me. The new system of using the roads for everything works very well for me.

    Apart that is from what I assume are bugs. For example I had my city running along nicely I left the city and when I came back to it suddenly the game decided that I no longer had a massive excess of power but instead a massive deficit I had to plop 20 more windmills just to break even???

    Bugs
    ----
    The game still contains a number of bugs, mostly minor but some are not, for example you may get locked out of a map due to 'processing' never to be able to play that map again. This of course could in turn screw up your entire region causing many many hours of gameplay to be simply wasted.

    Multiplayer
    -----------
    Sure you can let someone play a map in you region but don't be fooled this is a single player game. The global market? This boils down to the price you pay when you buy resources. Is it really influenced by other players? I don't know but it really makes no difference. If you need to buy resources then you pay the price the game tells you. That's it.

    Disasters
    ---------
    I've never been a fan of these. I don't see anyway of turning them off in a normal game. Why such a big deal? At 24 minutes per game day it took me about 1.5 hours to save for my school that's 1.5 hours of me doing nothing but let the game run. As soon as I plopped it down and earthquake hit and destroyed it. So I started the wait all over again. Guess what, another earth quake and destroyed again. I had a further three disasters in that session. I estimate about 7 hours gameplay of which about 6.5 hours was just letting the game run to save up money. Which is why you should just use the spam method to build up lots of cash at the start which makes a mockery of the economy in the first place.

    Replayability
    ------------
    If I'm honest I was getting bored by the end of my first session but I stuck with it. Overall there is lot of frustration from losing work and even entire maps but the number one problem by far is the tiny map size which limits creativity and gameplay possibilities. I'm going to give the game a little more time but I do feel I've got pretty much all I'm going get from it a far cry from past sim city games which I would play for months if not years. Always Online
    --------------
    I didn't buy Diablo because of this but took a chance here. From what I understand things like map size and game speed and limited to reduce the load on their servers. The irony is that I bought myself an expensive laptop so I could play all the latest games but for this game I could have stuck with with my old crappy one.

    My experience with this game has convinced me that I won't be buying any more games that require this, at least, not for a single player game.

    Overall
    -------
    If you are on the fence then wait until the price comes down before you consider trying it it is WAY overpriced at the moment and certainly not as stable as it should be.

    While it certainly a pretty game it is failing to hold my attention.    … Expand
  96. GOFLuvr
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    Electronic Arts recently informed people to stop promoting this game less than a week in stores, and while that speaks volumes, I'm here to share my own experiences with this game and the entire SimCity series. That experience goes all the way back April of 1990, when I started with SimCity Classic, and this was a game I loved that I played for hours upon hours. When I got SimCity 2000Electronic Arts recently informed people to stop promoting this game less than a week in stores, and while that speaks volumes, I'm here to share my own experiences with this game and the entire SimCity series. That experience goes all the way back April of 1990, when I started with SimCity Classic, and this was a game I loved that I played for hours upon hours. When I got SimCity 2000 in 1994, it was not only as addictive, but it was also better with the choice of density for Residential, Commercial, and Industrial zones (RCI as it's long since been dubbed) and signs to give names to streets and landmarks. SimCity 3000 (which I got in 1998) took away signs, and even without the arcologies that SimCity 2000 had, it was still an even better game and extremely fun to play. Then in 2004, i got the Deluxe Edition of SimCity 4, and the difficulty of the game made it less enjoyable, but I still had fun playing SC4, and really enjoyed everything that was right with the game. All of this changed in 2013 with the modern SimCity game!

    Even with the always online feature, I figured I can at least play alone, because the box said so. Something the game's box does not have written on it, is that the saved game files are not stored on the player's computer, and the player as at the whim for when the game is saved., and I honestly never would have bought the game if only I had known these things. I've had computers break my heart because they were too underpowered for some games (or lacked hard drive space), but SimCity was truly the first video game to succeed in breaking my heart for being the exact opposite of what all other SimCity games were (and still are), which is a city builder to obsess over! Another thing with the modern SimCity game, is that it's also been the first game in nearly thirty years of video gaming that I gave up on before I could even play it. While I was ok with needing to be online to play at first, the difficult to access game servers (at least in the game's first week of release in America) clearly establishes a double standard: EA/Maxis expects players to always be online to play the game, but at the same time, players cannot expect the servers to always be online in order to play the game whenever they wish.

    If any good comes out of this, I hope that the corporate suits realize what exactly is wrong with software that requires the user to always be online, and that software pirates are never going to go away. (Not that I'm a pirate or condone software piracy, but I've known about piracy going on for as long as I've first had a computer in 1986.)    … Expand
  97. EyEmAtchOo
    Mar 12, 2013
    7
    *Reviewed after 30 hours of playing* (This game has some wonderful potential, yet see below for game play issues.) If you like city sims, I still think this one is worth checking out. The graphics are beautiful and the game play has a lot of polish and fun factor. We spent an entire weekend lost in the fun of nurturing our towns and taking pride in our metropolises. The DRM issue is*Reviewed after 30 hours of playing* (This game has some wonderful potential, yet see below for game play issues.) If you like city sims, I still think this one is worth checking out. The graphics are beautiful and the game play has a lot of polish and fun factor. We spent an entire weekend lost in the fun of nurturing our towns and taking pride in our metropolises. The DRM issue is offensive, the day 1 server problems were inexcusable, and the handling by EA has been somewhat contemptible. (EA refuses refunds to customers who bought the game directly from them and couldn't play it due to EA's incompetent server scheme!) But, all that said, chances are none of these thing will affect your enjoyment moving forward. The actual game is largely as good as you hoped it would be. The city land size is not huge, but it's sufficient for an interesting city to be built. Being able to follow your citizens around in full 3D really makes you feel invested in the community you're creating. The amount of detail can be a bit mind blowing. Yet there are still several issues you should be aware of: //

    Game Breaking Problems:
    - Water is a finite resource, sometimes shockingly limited, and there is no way to import it from outside the region. The workaround seems to be to have a sewage outflow pipe dump sewage in the ground, and have a water pump with only filtered pump modules running next to it. This is pretty lame.
    - Recycling Centers are bugged, causing them to stop working, and leading to a pile up of recyclable garbage that is followed by massive ground pollution and a crippling health pandemic.
    - Traffic becomes very difficult to mitigate in a city of only 200 thousand residents. There are no highways you can build, only avenues, and every intersection results in more stop and go bottlenecks. If you make a road higher capacity, that is intrinsically connected with allowing higher density buildings there. So better roads actually causes more traffic there, and don't fix the problem for long.
    - Sims on the road don't yield to emergency vehicles. Soon crime, fire, and health problems can't be kept in check because all service vehicles all stuck in traffic with their sirens on. Garbage collection also starts to fail completion due to traffic, and also because garbage collectors seem to only randomly wander looking for trash to collect. Thus adding more garbage trucks to one garbage center becomes less and less helpful, since they tend to clump up near that center and follow each other around, leaving distant areas without any coverage. Adding a second center, even one with no dump of its own, seems to help. The region's Wind speed starts dramatically dying down after a few game years, making wind play like an unrealistically limited resource. Annoyances:
    - The game must be played by connecting to one of the (now many) EA servers. These servers don't coordinate at all. You might start a city on one server, and later find it is too crowded to connect. EA says "just connect to a different one", but then that server won't have your city available, and perhaps your friends are still on the first server. Even worse, the first time you connect to each server, it makes you play through the first time player tutorial all over again. The sim is great about showing you how things are right now. But it's hard to appreciate this in context with practically no historical data available. There no longer seem to be any graphs over time, aside from population, unlike the past SimCity games. I would really like to observe cause and effect by charting things like ground pollution over time alongside health problems over time. Or city income compared to education levels over time, or any of a large number of things.
    - You can't upgrade a road to an avenue without destroying every building on that road. If this is your $150K municipal building, too bad, you'll have to destroy and rebuild it.    … Expand
  98. Sirous
    Mar 12, 2013
    2
    Aside from the server and always online issues. There are some major bugs in the game that need to get fixed as well. With more gamebreaking bugs being found every day it seems. Traffic is the number one issue, only a few people have managed to truly trick the simulator and keep a good traffic flow going. A normal city layout and traffic pattern will not work and you need to fool the simsAside from the server and always online issues. There are some major bugs in the game that need to get fixed as well. With more gamebreaking bugs being found every day it seems. Traffic is the number one issue, only a few people have managed to truly trick the simulator and keep a good traffic flow going. A normal city layout and traffic pattern will not work and you need to fool the sims into going the way you want them too. Not normal, but tricks are needed. Essential services are broken, Fire trucks will all respond to the same fire, leaving others burning. They will all then go to the next fire and so on. Pathfinding on these is also horrendous, watching wrong turns and u-turns abound. Busses will do the same thing, they will all take the same paths and stop at the same stops over and over again. Anything far away in a densely packed city may never see a bus, or all of them at the same time. Very odd. Anything over 100k city will only see around 10% actually doing anything. While your city is demanding more workers and more shoppers. There are many more, Aside from the server issues, this promised to be a good game. Digging into it, it is hopelessly broken. Simulation fails on just about every level one could imagine. Maybe they did it to make it harder to desing a functioning city, or that region play was to fill in the gaps, if only region play actually worked.… Expand
  99. Nomius
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    I had to play in the "Antartic" server, coz this is the only up to play. After three hours playing, the server went down and now im unable to play since the last 5 hours. What a joke this DRM.
  100. Abedecain
    Mar 12, 2013
    0
    I was so frustrated and annoyed with this game I took it back to the store and demanded a refund, apparently I was the 5th one that day!

    This game is meant to be a single player with endless creativity, instead its pushed into a small box with lots of other people, I don't think minecraft would of done so well if it had gone down the same route. Do you really think EA cares, all they    I was so frustrated and annoyed with this game I took it back to the store and demanded a refund, apparently I was the 5th one that day!

    This game is meant to be a single player with endless creativity, instead its pushed into a small box with lots of other people, I don't think minecraft would of done so well if it had gone down the same route.

    Do you really think EA cares, all they want is your money, so DEMAND a refund!    … Expand
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Awards & Rankings

2
#2 Most Discussed PC Game of 2013
21
#21 Most Shared PC Game of 2013

Critic Reviews

All reviews »
Metascore
64

Mixed or average reviews - based on 75 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 26 out of 75
  2. Mixed: 39 out of 75
  3. Negative: 10 out of 75
  1. PC Master (Greece)
    Jun 5, 2013
    65
    Given enough patches and DCLs, SimCity might eventually become the game that should have been on its release and justify the ambiguous choices that its developers made. [May 2013]
  2. Games Master UK
    May 9, 2013
    68
    Hints at great things but is limited by small cities and promises it can't deliver on. [June 2013, p.80]
  3. Hyper Magazine
    May 9, 2013
    40
    There's more problems with this game than I have words. Looks great though. [June 2013, p.80]
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