Simcity Mobile Game Review

It's been an uneven week for SimCity. Players queued for as long as 50 minutes for solo play too, and in some cases, if their cities got deleted, they lost hours of progress.

The server issues have been improved, but now that we're eventually capable of building cities without worrying about being not connected, we've found some other, more fundamental problems with the game.

Simcity Mobile Game Review

Primary, it's fiendishly addictive. Watching your city develop is spectacular, as luxury apartments substitute small leafy apartments, and massive skyscrapers are brought up in your commercial districts. The Glassbox engine, generated specifically for the game, skillfully imitates the effect of tilt-shift photography, and it looks elegant. There is an unbelievable amount of detail when you come down to street level, down to individual hikers.

You determine how your city develops. You can create your fortune by creating a tourist map that generates its money from sightseeing and gambling, drilling for oil. Educated towns with a university can produce and vend high-tech goods.

Or you can overlook money altogether and decide your objectives: rising your population, making your citizens happiest, or cutting down air pollution.

Then you lack space. These are the minimum cities in the series to date, and you'll hit the border of your plot of land in just a few hours. Your citizens will beg for more houses, more jobs, and more places to shop, but you won't have anywhere to construct them.

Gameplay of Simcity Mobile Game

Your only choices are to demolish existing buildings to make space for new ones, which will only produce more problems or create a new city.

Your ability to be creative is also restricted. As their concreteness increases, your cities all end up looking fundamentally the same; an ideal square of buildings sitting clumsily in the middle of an empty area of countryside.

Curved and circular roads are a new facet, but using them feels counterproductive when space is such a valuable commodity.

If there are untaken plots of land in your region, you can construct additional cities and split resources with them. But if you're enjoying in an area with many people, there are chances of fewer spaces.

Regions are part of why the game requires a stable internet connection. They're like self-sufficient servers that host manifold cities. You can unite a public region with arbitrary players or generate a private one that's invite-only.

Graphics in Simcity Mobile Game

Building cities alongside friends is fun, and you can aid them out by donating extra garbage trucks or selling them any overload power or water you generate, but this comes at a cost.

The disadvantage of this online transportation is that cities are stored on the cloud, not your hard drive, and there's no saving or loading.

The days of triggering disasters just for the enjoyment of it, then reloading to lapse the damage, are over. All decisions, and mistakes, are enduring, and there's no way to back your cities up.

These online headaches aren't the conclusion of SimCity's problems. The simulation itself is flawed in several ways, most remarkably the traffic. If you have a wide, no traffic freeway, cars will disregard it in favor of a one-lane dirt road, just because it's a shorter route to their goal – even if it's jammed with traffic.

Maxis has promised to repair this in a patch, but it's confusing how it made it into the game in the first place. We loved SimCity for the first few hours, but the obligation soon gave way to irritation.

Pros and Cons in Simcity

The simulation promises more than it distributes, and you feel continually boxed in by the meager city sizes. The social features are appealing, but we'd rather have the aptitude to save our game, play offline, and not have to agonize about server downtime.

The local multiplayer really should be an elective aside from a standard single-player mode.

There's a thrill to be had here, but it doesn't last. The low-level simulation looks imposing when you see hundreds of cars whizzing around your streets, but it's all a delusion. When they're returning from work, your sims will make it to the nearby empty house; the same AI method that controls sewage as it's sucked down your streets to the nearby outflow pipe.

A game like this should offer hundreds of hours of gameplay, but it'll only take you a fraction of that to see what little that SimCity has to proffer.