SimCity Beta thoughts from me. Not a review of the game, obv. Everyone on the net seems to be giving their opinions including on the EA forums, so I think we can throw any NDA's out of the way.
Well, last weekend I happily got a shot at the SimCity beta. Now, I’m a really big fan of the Sim City series, with the fourth being the greatest in my opinion. The amount of detail you can achieve in Sim City 4 is pretty incredible, with you being able to create your own unique vision of a city - from rural towns with bushfire fire-fighting airfields to busy industrial ports and New England harbour resorts. There are thousands of custom buildings available online, many based on buildings both famous and unknown. Hell, Cardiff’s Irish pub Dempseys is in there. It really is a huge game.
In holding up such a massive game as a comparison, a surface look at SimCity gives cause for worry. For one it looks a lot smaller, a lot less detailed and a hell of a lot less mod-friendly. But I was itching to give it a go all the same, so I was very pleased when I got the chance to have a go on the beta.
The SimCity beta gives you a 25 minute tutorial (which is pretty boring) and a one hour free-play that you can repeat as many times as you like. I had time for a total of three plays over the weekend.
The first thing that hits you is how small the city tile is. The Maxis designers say that it is equivalent to a medium sized Sim City 4 tile, but in fact it seems a lot more like the smallest size. This is my biggest concern. I just don’t feel as if I’ll be able to get a natural feeling city with such a space constraint. By the time you hit skyscrapers you’ll have crowded out space for the suburbs with your CBD. There’ll be no smooth city-like transition from the burbs to the downtown. In one hour I managed to fill two thirds of it.
Now quite a few on the Simtropolis forum have said that this limitation kills the game for them. To be honest, it was a little close but in the end I worked with it. I’ve always been a slow developer in Sim City and I hate quickly zoning huge blocks. I like to work in more minute detail and more organically. In two days play I’ll just be reaching the 100,000’s. I actually enjoy the early stages of Sim City a hell of a lot, and have always been baffled at people’s keenness to reach skyscraper status early. Maybe it’s the small-town America fixation I have. One great thing about my beta experience is that I found I could make even more plausible suburbs than in SC4. True, my concern still stands that they’d be crowded out and redeveloped too soon, but the new curvy road building tools allowed me to give a really nice organic feel. I went for a radial pattern, with three circles of houses and artery spokes in the European manner. It looked neat, but I wish the houses didn’t fill up so much space with their barren back yards. There was too much room between buildings in my opinion. Also, the zoning is a little off. I like how you control density by road type, so big buildings will only grow alongside four lane streets and such, but the zone tool just shows a colour along the side of the road and gives no indication as to how much room your structures will take up. This is being fixed, apparently.
I still had room to set my industry to one side of the map and I zoned strips of commercial along the main artery. The Glassbox engine models each sim, so as one moves in it gets a job and starts working in one of the buildings. It will spend its money in the commercial zone. It will suffer accidents or illness from pollution in the industrial zone, and so on. This worked very transparently and very well. One neat moment was when a bunch of sims turned to crime and went out to rob a store. Other sims who had become policemen went and spoilt the party. There was a gunfight. An injured sim was taken to hospital in an ambulance, but a traffic jam from a shonky network I built meant the poor hero died en route to the clinic. Cool. This is the kind of detail I like.
One great feature is the data visualisation. The data overlay shades your city to a glowing monochrome and by clicking on things like crime, electricity, unemployment you can really see in real time the fluctuations in data, pretty awesome. I particularly liked the air pollution, which you could see swinging around with the wind. It’s something the new game really nails.
So with my town reaching seven thousand I started plopping down civic buildings. A fun new feature is the modular additions you can plonk down on existing facilities. Need more power? Add a wind turbine to your plant. Need a larger feeder area for your school? Add school buses. Want a faster fire response time? Add a firehouse bell. These are fun and useful additions.
In addition, the city feels nicely alive. The traffic works really well and the population appears bustling. And you know it’s all simulated properly, which adds an extra ‘cool’.
I have to say though that some facilities seemed a little sloppy. The sewage outflow looked stupid, and although watching the sewage be sucked from your city through the data layer was both very amusing and oddly mesmerising, the actual building looked beyond retarded. Some of the buildings are somewhat ruined in looks by the modular add-ons too, as they don’t always seem to be really connected organically. The casino is a culprit in particular. It is not a game that Jonathan Meades would love.
Actually, he probably would.
How was the overall look? Well, it’s a lot more toy-town looking than Sim City 4. It just doesn’t look as real. However, I kind of enjoyed the look of the game. The tilt-shift can be switched off (I liked it on low) and you can apply some fun filters to alter the visual style, such as sepia, vintage, bleached, Sin City and so on. There’s a colourful, fun look to the game and it is visually very appealing. It also runs remarkably smoothly on my humble laptop, so it is very well optimised. I felt quite a lot of affection towards the look of my beta city. But I have to say, it never truly felt like a city in the way that Sim City 4 did. I felt it was a place, but a sort of stylised city, not quite real. I haven’t decided yet if this will grow to annoy me or not. But if it is not very real, at least it seems lived in. It’s fun to see little fire engines and ambulances zipping about, or garbage men picking up the trash and hauling it back to the landfill.
The textures were a little lacking in many places, and factories and stores had disappointingly generic signs, but I think this is merely a lack of polish in the beta and a sign of the small download – 2 gigabytes compared to the full games 12 gigabytes. I do hope that parks are improved though, they looked ugly as sin. The camera is both smooth and intuitive and the view zooms in to about five stories up. So while you cannot walk about your city you can at least immerse yourself in the bustle.
As to region play, this was of course locked off. You can see other cities in the distance and it looks kind of neat, but the inability to make a truly interlocking metropolis out of multiple cities is pretty disappointing. At least a good explanation was given on Reddit thread by a Maxis designer. He said that it looked fake when a neighbouring tile was adjacent due to the traffic suddenly disappearing, and they could never get the detailed view of a close up neighbour to match reality without the processing power being prohibitive. Despite this, I really wish that the tiles were not only bigger, but of a more irregular shape. The compulsion to fill a tile means there will be a lot of odd, square cities out there.
I didn’t get chance to dabble in mass transit much. There are buses and light rail but no subway. There have been complaints at these limitations but subways and monorails didn’t make an appearance until the SC4 expansion pack Rush Hour, which you had to pay for. I imagine it is well simulated however.
So, in all, what did I think? Well, it wins my cautious approval. It will never replace Sim City 4 as it simply isn’t as detailed enough in the ability to truly make any city you want. It is more toy-town than metropolis. Also, I fear that games will be on the short-and-sweet side and you won’t be given the satisfaction of truly nurturing a city over a period of weeks. Will this make of a short shelf-life? I’m not sure. It all depends on how many fresh challenges the complexity of the simulation can throw at you. On the plus side, it does look rather lovely and I did have genuine fun with it. It’s certainly obviously better than Spore. The music is rather fine too and in the old Sim City manner.
My instincts say that this will be best judged apart from Sim City 4, as a worthwhile desert rather than a main course. As such I’ll wait on the reviews and consensus and perhaps buy it when it is a smidgeon cheaper. It is after all a tad overpriced. The fantastically named Ocean Quigley, lead developer, says that mod support will be added later, but it remains to be seen as to whether EA will allow any threat to the inevitable micro-transactions store. Fingers crossed.
My verdict: Not as bad as feared, not as good as hoped. This wins a ‘Raised Eyebrows of Mild but Hesitant Approval’.
Meanwhile, here are some official screens:
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