December 12, 2007
With The Sims series being the best selling PC game ever, it’s not surprising Electronic Arts keeps trying to milk their profitable product with expansions and spin-offs. Simcity Societies is the latest game based on The Sims, offering you the possibility to “run” an entire city. A mix of The Sims and Simcity is a pretty good description. If you are looking for an in-depth complex city builder then perhaps you should ignore this game. It’s quite simple in structure, and will only offer casual city building options. Disappointingly it’s so easy to win in this game that it offers almost no challenge. The game does look pretty good and there are a lot of buildings you can build, though the engine could have been optimized more for smoother gameplay.
The idea sounds good in theory: Each building you place has a positive or negative effect on a particular social energy. There are six of these energies, from creativity to spirituality, and each building uses or provides them in different amounts. As your city grows, you unlock newer buildings and décor, each of which is separated into various themes, such as “romantic” or “cyberpunk.” You don’t have to theme your city, so feel free to mix and match. The categorizations are actually rather helpful because you can create themed neighborhoods without having to scroll through full lists of buildings.
Your Sims need to have places to work, hang out, and live, but you’ll rarely need to worry about it. To succeed in SimCity Societies, all you have to do is treat your social energies as currency and keep them relatively evened out. Doing that makes everything from Sim happiness to your coffers fall nicely into place. Need authority? Build a town hall. Have too much? Build a police station. Just don’t ask why it is a police station spends authority–like many of the categorizations, the connection between a building and its social energies is mighty unclear. Why would a service station spend productivity, while a butcher shop creates it? All you can do is look beyond it and realize that it’s not a connection at all–just a random abstraction created to balance out what is in effect six different currencies running simultaneously.
Click here for the full review at GameSpot.
