RPS has a preview article up about the new Sim City game

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/03 ... k-simcity/

Yea, I'm totally going to buy that game. I love SimCity.

Ah, that's pretty lame. I wasn't gonna buy it at release anyway so this doesn't change that much for me, but still.

Forgot I'd even signed up, but I'm in the closed beta for this weekend. Just installing it, will let you know what it's like once I've had a good mess about on it

Edit: The review

Well overall it's a very good game. Not sure I'd pay the full price for it considering it's waaay above an average pc price and also the whole online constantly thing. But then again it comes out in March and as one of my birthday presents (Stick of Truth) may now not be out in March... I may consider making someone else pay for it for me Now to the actual review.

It's a bit of a strange beta, I wouldn't actually call it a beta at all if it weren't for the in-game inclusion of a "report bug" option. You get into the game (after queuing to log in because 1. It's Sim City so everyone is attempting to get in who has a code and 2. It's EA and one day in the next 100 years they might figure out how to actually run a server) and do a tutorial which is basically an existing city that has been abandoned by the old mayor because he was frankly useless. So you do a few quests that teach you the basics, like supplying power and water, placing roads, zoning, keeping people happy etc. Then you go into the actual beta, which is an hour long freeplay on your own city. Once the hour is over you get kicked back to the main menu and can go play another hour but it starts as a blank map again. Also a lot of the features aren't available in the beta; for example with mass transport you can build most of the bus-related items but no trains, street cars or airports.

Graphics:
I was quite happy with the graphics, I didn't even check until I'd nearly gotten to the end of my second hour and then realised it was mostly running on low with the odd on medium. I might try messing with them tomorrow and see what my computer can handle. Everything is nice and easy to see and well defined so at a glance you can easily tell what things are. There is a lot of detail, all your residents are actually moving around the city (I got up to ~3000 at my highest, some people have reported over 100,000 in their hour!) and you can click on them to follow them. Of course they aren't in high detail - they look very much like zoomed out Sims 1 sims but you don't need much more.

The buildings randomly change the way they look in residential, commercial and industrial zones, so not every factory is a clone of another. They also differ based on wealth, so again you can see at a glance if you're looking at a poor neighbourhood filled with trailers and ramshackle buildings or if you're looking at mansions it's obviously got wealthy residents.

Sound:
Sound is good, there is a relaxing music track constantly playing (hopefully there will be more than one as it may get very irritating after a while, though with this kind of game I'd probably turn it off anyway and put my own on if I felt the need). There are plenty of sound bites as well to add life to your city; car horns honking, sirens on emergency vehicles and also helpful ones such as a doorbell ringing when you click a residential zone so you know the kind of zone you've selected. Not much to say really.

Gameplay:
As I've never properly played the others I can't really compare. My only previous experience was Sim City... 3000? 4? I forget which, but I picked it up, attempted to lay some electric/water lines and gave up. Far too confusing. This one seems much more pick up and play, but still will require plenty of strategy.

You have your menu at the bottom where you will control pretty much everything. There you can choose your different types of buildings, zones and roads to place and it also has tabs for region/city control, budget and population.

Everything takes place on one large map - on this map are multiple cities that can all be owned by you or may be owned by other people, plus a "great works" site. This great works site will benefit all cities on the map; for example in the tutorial map it is an airport. All the cities pay some money towards it and they all gain from added tourism. You can also trade with the other cities in your region - again as an example the tutorial map has you receiving garbage disposal from your neighbouring city, saving you the cost of building a garbage disposal plant.

All utilities now follow roads, so if you lay out your roads well, water, electric and sewage will follow, provided you of course place water towers, sewage outlets and power stations connected to the roads. Important buildings themselves can be upgraded. Instead of having to build maybe 5 power stations to power your city, if you're running low you can add extra wind turbines to your existing wind farm. This doesn't just apply to utilities either. Schools can have extra classrooms added, hospitals can have more ambulance bays etc.

A nice little feature to help out is that if anything is critically needed, it will highlight first yellow and eventually red on the menu bar. Once you click on that submenu a tip will pop up telling you exactly what it is that your residents need. You can also see at a glance in the bottom right hand corner what is needed or will be needed by a coloured graph - green for residential, blue for commercial and yellow for industrial. If any of these get near the top you need to zone more of them. Very handy for beginners or just for highlighting issues once your city becomes too large to easily keep track of things.

You have a huge number of statistical tools available as well. Your overall income is shown permanently on the main menu, colour coded so you can see at a glance if you're in profit or losing money and clicking on it brings up a fairly standard expenditure table. Red on one side for your outgoing, green on the other for your incoming and again the total at the bottom is nicely colour coded so if you're not bothered about the actual figures, a glance will tell you what you need. You can also take out up to 3 loans from this window.

As well as this there are... oh probably about 30 or more various maps that you can see, called data layers. These show things as an overlay on your city such as power flow, ground pollution, land value (good for bringing in wealthy residents to up your taxes!), population density... tons of things. You can even see a breakdown of happiness per zone type and within that zone type you can break it down further between the poor, medium and wealthy residents.

Just in case you get bored simply building the city as well you will occasionally get little quests from people within your city. These show as a thought bubble as you're zooming about and you can certainly ignore them but they will usually give you a little objective to do, such as achieve x% approval from your residents, treat x many sick people or build x. I'm not sure what the rewards are (the one I got involved building a building that wasn't available in beta) but they can at least give you an idea on something new to do/build.

And of course you can get disasters. There was some kind of meteor strike programmed into the tutorial (on my neighbour, not me!) and in my second playthrough I may have allowed a fire to wipe out half my industrial zone (I only had 10 minutes left and wanted to see what happened). I've also heard you can get zombie apocalypses.

All in all it's definitely a fun game. Well worth pirating I'm sure I've forgotten to mention a ton of stuff but feel free to ask if I have. I'll probably have another go or 2 on it tomorrow.

Thanks for the big review Pev!! It sounds like it could be a lot of fun, especially with the multiple cities concept. I wonder if it will be possible to make "refuse" cities (full of garbage piles and heavy industry) and "paradise" ones (all clean and shiny and everything). In that case I will go mad professor on the game before too long.

All in all what you described sounds quite similar to previous sim cities, but no surprise there I suppose. Looking forward to having a zombie apocalypse happen already (and in the game).

Well I've given in and preordered it. Partly because if you pre-ordered early Feb you got 4 x £10 off vouchers for other stuff on Origin. And they have some of the Total War games I don't yet have so might just use them on that. Plus my parents still haven't asked what I want for my birthday

Should be possible to do that, you can sell services after all so you could have a city filled with coal factories and garbage trucks etc and sell them to your shiny cities so you don't have stinking heaps of rubbish there. Plus if factories etc get abandoned they turn into rubble and look nasty (and become fire hazards)

Then I know what my cluster of cities will look like Sucks for the peeps working in Dumpsterville or Heavy Industria, but hey, we can't all be living the rockstar life in a nice and green city.

Got in the beta again last weekend... but it said select server then had none to select. A lot of people had the same issue. GG EA. Better sort that out before release...

I presume you guys have heard about how completely screwed the game is now. Yay always-on DRM! Great work EA! Maybe this'll wake them up and kill of the internet requirement. I won't buy the game if it requires a constant internet connection. Too bad... I really loved Sim City.

Kinda hard not to notice since its pretty much on the front page of every gaming site. . I'll buy the game but install a modified version. They get their money and I get my game.

I heard the stories - not smart of them releasing Sim City AND a sims expansion on the same day

Having said that I got both for my birthday and downloaded both with no issues yesterday and played Sim City all evening. No issues whatsoever, which has incensed (rightly) the americans even more as they're still having problems and UK launch has been smooth. I did notice the servers kept losing connection while I was playing but EA have actually done one smart thing (first time for everything and I'm sure they'll screw it up) - the "always online" bit isn't strictly true, they have a failsafe so if you lose connection whilst playing you can keep going for a little while until it kicks you off. I managed not to get kicked off for 5 hours straight and when I finally was it's coz I ignored the little "server connection lost" and tried to load my second city.