When Boredom Strikes

What has been synonymous with city-building fun has now become a repetitive chore.

I have to commend Maxis for making the best Sim games I have played so far, so why aren't they at the wheel at the latest installment of the SimCity franchise? EA wanted another firm to run the show and run it they did--poorly.

Common to most SimCity games involves a lot of realistic socio-economical factors that would dictate the success of your city. In the new game, all you really have to do is just checking and balancing the happiness of your sims and all you really have to do is a lot of mindless clicking.

Sure, the graphics are a great improvement, but do we really need great graphics to have a great game? This is a lot like a diet-version, even a light-version, of the usual SimCity games that we have come to love. Why? It's because you get to choose what kind of buildings you would have in your city. More emphasis was placed in the power of choosing specific buildings for creating specific societies. You'd find that there would be different kinds of cities with different kinds of buildings with different kinds of sims.

When you get a stable economy, you'd find that there's no more to do than wanton expansion of your city. Which is a great challenge, I'm sure, if you're a three year old. The game is simply too easy, the level of realism has sinked to an all time low, and it's mostly eye candy.

The verdict? The graphics of the game is a much needed breather for the franchise, but it comes with the cost of totally depriving would-be tycoons of the challenges and realism that the previous installments had to offer.

Screenshots