Review : SimCity Societies

My social energy is better than yours .

From my experience with this game I can say that Simcity didn't evolved a lot as years went by , but in the end the producers got bored of the same game mechanics and here we are . Tilted Mill, the new team , came with some minor innovations that gave birth to a not so good clone of City Life . The reasons that determined them to destroy a perfect series can be found in games like – Caesar IV and Cities: Children of the Nile, both already destroyed . I believe that the guys from Tilted Mill are a kind of Uve Boll of sim games made by Electronic Arts.

What are the problems ? Beside a prison and a propaganda building I can't see what else they did right . I mean - I can't get past this problem – you have someone like Will Wright, who is smarter than you and he does a great job at creating games that work perfectly and 'catchy' . Of course they thought that they can do better so the result was a game that is more Caesar IV than a SimCity. My level of disappointment is huge . Now don't you think that my disappointment is created by some kind of conservatorism . It's because they made a game without flavour , without a 'soul' if I might say . I will prove you this remark with the following .

Some examples

So, SimCity Societies is organized around some energies not on the people that require those „resources”, as they call it . These resources are around seven and they are Spirituality, Production, Creativity etc. In the city you won't be able to determine economical , industrial , residential zones as you could previously do it. You will build building by building . Some of them will produce these energies other consume it . The big problem of the game is that it is very hard to balance the building that produce with the ones that consume . Like an example , you will have buildings that cumulate Productivity and some that consume this resource , without having a logic . Another example is that paint shops consume Creativity instead of producing it , as it would be normal . But Creativity is cumulated by a wall , yes that is correct , a simple wall . There are many examples like this one and the bad thing is that you will have to browse through almost 500 of these buildings . I'm very sure that the producers invested much more time in how the buildings look than how the buildings behave . That's why , if you want ,with 5 buildings you can construct your entire city . There is no need for 500 buildings doing the same thing. Let's continue . It doesn't matter where you construct the buildings . For example you can put the buildings that create electricity in a corner of the map as well in the middle of the city. The efect will be the same. There is no need to connect them because in the moment you construct them they will start producing electricity for the buildings near them. I did an experiment and built in the middle of the forest some of these building that produce Electricity and the result was that they were offering the required quantity of this resource without being visited by people . Thus we have a complete lack of interdependency in a city which is against the basic principles that should characterize a game like this . Regarding the people there are only three resources needed : electricity , jobs and entertainment . These needs can be fast covered and the strange thing is that jobs are never a problem because your citisens don't seem to care if they have jobs or not . Not even the houses aren't needed in large quantities because only a handfull of houses can acustom thousands of citisens .

The end .. of the series

There are hundreds of examples like this one and bugs , lots of them . Congratulations Tilted Mill for another franchise destroyed . Simcity Societies is a simple and screwed game .

Rating 6.3