Gaming SimCity (2013) review

Same problem, will mean the game ends up costing waaaaaaay too much (in my opinion)

 

It will be cracked when they come with loading & saving city locally, without the requirement to load a city from server, while you lost all progression when you were "offline". And have multiple cities of the region communicating with each other, and load them at the same session. While offline.

Until then, the rest is bs.
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As for the review. Really disappointing. 70% maybe, 80% more likely. 90% maybe, after patch 2.0.
But 40% seems bit-tech jumped the hate bandwagon to cash in.

I bought it the week after the initial release. And after all the issues. Because two of my colleagues got it and said was fun. (I had cancelled the pre-order due to the "scaremongering" about the always online).


Now I have clocked 160 hours ( 10x more than I spent on Cities XL and as much playing SC4 back in 2004).

And as the others said, many working day "nights" went without sleep or at 2-3am. Weekends? What is Monday already? Lunch breaks on laptop, from work, with a network going through proxies at the HQ in Denmark (from England). No issue what so ever with internet connection then

The game is FUN. No boring excel spreadsheets to go through like in SC4. You have traffic issue. Is because cars physically go from A to B. It not a representation of statistics. Try to fix it.

Small maps, yes some feel small, especially the ones where half map is hill. But that can be improved.

Overall the game is awesome, and worth the money. On the contrary a game that lasts 6-7 hours like Crysis and costs the same, how's possible to get more than 10%. Because the value/time played is abysmal compared to SC (2013).

 

I really don't think 40% is harsh at all, rather dead on in fact.

It has potential to be great, but the overall lack of scale and always on requirement means it is mediocre at best. I count the connectivity into the score because there are an awful lot of people in the country who won't be able to play this game for varying amounts of time, and whats the point in spending £40 on a game that won't work consistently?

Add in the fact that advertising is now invading the game with the charging stations (and more to come) and it smacks of a money grab operation before the realisation that the game just isn't that good.



Also..

It can be improved, yes. Will it be improved without a crack or paid for dlc? No. Hence downmarking for this.

Rating a game on playtime is just, well, no. Crysis doesn't have a 6-7 hour playtime. Did you just purposely ignore the inclusion of a multiplayer aspect?
Example: I played Borderlands 2 for about 4 hours singleplayer, but 130 hours in coop. Does that mean it only gets 10%?

 

It's the worst great game I've played in a while, and Mat hits it spot on in his conclusion. Building your city, watching it grow, is all super fun.

Then you find fire engines not responding to fires, endless traffic jams ( a bit fixed now), resource sharing that takes forvever, garbage collection that never gets all the cans of trash, conga-lines of buses/street cars, massive traffic gridlock at the single entry point to the city, no over passes, no one way streets, no subways, and so it goes on and on and on.

IMO 40% is a bit harsh, but Mat argues his case well if you look beyond just going to the score on the second page. It doesn't change the fact that this is a game I paid for, and that I think is simultaneously great and totally rubbish.

 

It did deserve better!! Like sm1 mentioned, you can loose complete track of time while playing this game. I was annoyed at the multi city format at first, but once cities are connected, workers travel to other places etc just like a real city. You cant have a casino, an oil mine, a coal mine,university in the same little city- makes sense.

Dont understand why everyone is aggravated with EA these days? They are just protecting their interests.

 

Wow. Glad to see bit-tech standing up and telling it how it is - I agree with the article completely.

Also, what XXAOSICXX said - "... but everyone seems to think that because they've had some fun with the game it shouldn't be given any less than 80% - this is nonsense. If the game has limited long term appeal, puts barriers in the way of the user enjoying it and is "fun, but i won't play be playing it for long" it deserves a below average score."

 

TBH I'm very reluctant to try this sim city game simply because I haven't found any of them fun. Thats coming from sim city, sim city 2000 and a few recent mobile versions of the game. All had the same problem, it felt like you where watching a city with a few buttons to push without actually being in control like in Anno.

 

Hate to break it to you but that is RL, thats why we have traffic jams...

 

I've always been a Simcity fan but have been totally turned off by this latest release.

Normally I would have waited until it's been reduced in price and then I could live with any flaws that might be present. But with SC5 I just can't see one redeeming feature that would make me over look all the negatives.

I've hated EA for years anyway, and I object to being forced to install 3rd party software in order to be able to play a video game, so it's all for the best really, EA didn't get my money and my PC stays crap free.

 

perhaps this should have had 2 scores, one if you're an always-on-internet-user, and one if you're not?

 

Problem as a PC player if you ignore origin you ignore battlefield 3/4 crysis 3 and all the need for speed games. Not sure I could personally live without them.

I don't mind origin personally its not intrusive and works as well as steam does for the most part.

Sim city has always been about the management of the city. Cities xl 2012 allows you to make huge cities and is fun to play in a different way to sim city.

Also don't personally get the gripe about game costs either, bf3 has probably cost me less than 10 pence per hour played.

Even sim city is below £1 per hour now and that's after short time.

My sister owns every sims expansion for the sims 3 and has played 1200 hrs acording to origin. That's about 25 pence per hour lol.

Min wage in uk is what £7 so its cost if I earned min wage 1/7th of that per hour worked for 65 hrs to buy sim city that's not really anything special. My fuel costs for petrol are a lot more than 1 game will ever cost.

 

Riiight. So.. if the M1 is closed, or has a 117 hour traffic jam you are still going include it in your journey plan and camp on the slip road for 5 days? Or perhaps you are going to choose an alternative route?

This highlights one of the games worse features. Once a sim has chosen its route and set off, it will not change its course. It will sit in a traffic jam for hours trying to get to the same job as countless other sims. Eventually, all of those sims will get to that job and find it full. They will then all attempt to move to another job en masse at another location until all jobs are filled or in most cases, they run out of work hours.

Yes the game is great, and functions quite well while operating in the low density period of the game. Once your population increases however, things quickly spiral out of control.

Anyone who reads the SimCity forums can see the myriad of issues that players face when trying to create the perfect city. Problems from people losing hours of work when their city disappears from the cloud to game breaking flaws such as the recycling centre bug.

The game AI is abysmal. I have personally witnessed a garbage truck driving around in circles for the entire duration of its shift. Emergency vehicles all attending one incident while another goes unanswered.

The game is broken and the developers do not know how to fix it. The only way cheetah speed will ever be enabled is when enough players have stopped playing the game to alleviate the server load.

The review is spot on. For every great feature that this game has, it has twice as many infuriating 'features'.

No amount of paid EA trolling will change that. Ka-ching!

 

The review was good imo. As for the score, personally I agree as I think 50% is average. In a way I wish sites didn't include a rating but people always want one. I'd much rather have pros/cons bullet points and then I can make up my own mind.

 

I been thinking of getting this game but I also dislike the small map sizes I may or may not get it (guess I wait until the delux version is below £50-40, to bad I did not get the game when it had come out as I would of got an free game out of it)

mite give city XL a go as there maps have been super size on youtube

 

Seriously? People defending this travesty of a game? No wonder EA thinks they can ride their customers when people are willing to defend an atrocity of a game like this just because they fear being associated with a bandwagon.

40% is generous.

 

If the game wasn't fundamentally and mechanically broken. The score would've been higher.

Even without the DRM it's still broken. Which is a shame.

 

I do think 40% is perhaps too harsh, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out that an 80% would be outrageous. The game was advertised as a true simulation, and is in fact only the most basic kind. The game is broken fundamentally in many ways (just look up the videos of all fire engines heading to one fire at a time or 100% residential cities with max population and no crime or fires, no electricity or water etc etc), had a terribly botched launch despite repeated promises they would be prepared, game features are still disabled, they have lied about the reason for online repeatedly (as has been demonstrated by players and even potentially from the horse's mouth), and the game is in many ways far inferior to the last.

Tell me again why the game deserves ~80%? I'm glad people enjoying it are having fun, since I am not spiteful and am glad people are getting their money's worth. But to claim the game is more than a failure that had great potential (the last game with many of the ideas implemented this time would have been incredibly), just because fun can potentially be had from it, does not make it a high quality game. ****, I "had fun" with Daikatana for Christ's sake.

If they had the multiplayer features this game possesses (great works, collaboration between cities etc), with the same map size as the previous iteration, with no online requirement, no less features than the last game (subways for example), the ability to save and was actually a simulation unlike this sorry excuse, they would have had an amazing game. Even with a botched launch the game would have settled out and been a huge success for everyone involved. A game worth the initial trouble.

But no, this game is a <50% for sure.

 

lol 40% - attention seeking score that one.

I got it for my kids who love minecraft and general building games a few days after release. They had almost no connection problems and have spent many hours happily building cities. In addition due to the connection problems they never really suffered they got NFS:MW free.

While I don't like EA and their attempt to extract money from everything, and I agree with the faults (cities too small, no save) it's still a fun game and it works fine if you have the internet (i.e most of us). It's still a more fun game then many of the 80% bit tech scored games.

 

I don't think so, It really highlights the problems with the game, which is the still bugged AI and traffic system. In other words, at one point progression stops being progression and begins to feel arbitrary. Once this happens the game while still fun is less rewarding.

 

It's good to see people debating about this, and most of them without being overly emotive. Quite why anyone thinks the new games editor is jumping on a bandwagon remains to be seen, since from what I've read he just didn't rate it overall. He is far from alone.

I'm not big on city builders, although the last one I played was SC4 and I've not touched the Anno series, the Cities series, the Tropico series, or indeed any other god games for some time.

So far I have yet to be swayed by the lovers, this sounds like a game I'd play furiously for a couple of days then get frustrated and put it down permanently.