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Oh, hey guys, what's this?
A left-field SimCity review, that's what!
Exciting bongo music and a jangly guitar riff play in a funky skillo kind of way. Cracks of thunder are heard. An Angry-Faced blocky sim tears down a long road in the middle of nowhere in a Lotus 7 license plate DLC £3.99. It pulls up the town hall. Angry-Face jumps out of car and marches up the steps, knocking aside gibberish-spouting protesters as he does so. To another crack of thunder he opens the door dramatically before striding up to a desk in front of some-guy and slapping an envelope down on it marked 'Quality Assurance Report'. He then storms out to more thunder and heads home, taking care to angrily hem in an inexplicably polite fire engine headed to a three alarm blaze at World-O-Orphans. Angry Face stomps up his steps and retreats into his house.
But when he awakes he's in another home!
“Where am I?”
“In the city.”
“Feels more like a village to me. What do you want?”
"Simulation."
"Whose side are you on?"
“That would be telling. And I swear to you its not the shareholders of Electronic Arts, for example. We want simulation, simulation... simulation!”
"You won't get it!"
"By patch or by DLC, we will."
"No, seriously. You won't. I have trouble not taking half an hour to find my way to the local Londis next door. Anyway, who are you?”
“No. 2. No jokes, please.”
“Who is Number 1?”
“You are Sim 27,886.”
“I am not a number! I am a fully automated agenda-stroke-sim with emergent AI!”
“HA HA HA HA HA!”
If Electronic Arts had Leo McKern’s voice brimming with slightly darkly edged but hugely jolly bonhomie, I might be able to take its sinister villainy in good cheer, instead of frowning hurt. Just under a month ago they released their latest iteration of the SimCity series, one that had previously reached a giddy pinnacle with Sim City 4 – a game so good communities still thrive around it today, offering up exciting new mods and city journals. Many people would have been content with a repetition of the old spreadsheet number-crunching format of previous titles, married with curvy roads and slightly nicer graphics. Maxis, somewhat bravely, decided to take a different route. Let’s see how well they did…
Oppressed by a meaningless existence within the confines of a small town, No. 27,886 suddenly punches a local cop and makes a heroic break for the train station on his little Mini Moke. A long slender finger based in Town Hall reaches out and presses a big red button as a bald bloke in spectacles intones the words ‘Orange Alert, Orange Alert’ over and over. Sinister bubbling occurs offshore, followed by a somewhat less sinister pop-up message…
“Sinister bouncing weather-balloon shaped faceless representation of all-surveying-all-knowing incomprehensible technology and control is disabled until SimCity’s servers have been patched.”
No. 2: “Arse!”
But he needent have worried. Hampered by a rudimentary path-finding AI, No. 27,886 simply drives around the Motorpoint Arena for no discernable reason, before headed to a random home.
“You know, it would be a lot easier to bug his room if he could make his mind up on where he lived.”
There’s actually a lot to like about SimCity. For a start, it looks and sounds beautiful. You might not rate that highly, as quite a few games make an effort to be spingly-spangly, but SimCity really does pull out all stops and actually achieves a rather charming atmosphere that can really lull you into thinking your hovering over a real-life dinky little city of your own making. Houses and cars are modelled in a way that is half way between real-life and toy-town and the rolling hills and forests have a zen simplicity. The light is pretty beautiful too, and it is always heartwarming to see the sun rise of your little town. Fast forward on to a bustling little city centre filled with skyscrapers, theatres and plazas and there’s a cool feeling of buzzing electricity. And all the while the lush score, part-classical, part jazz, eases your mind into a relaxed, amiable state as city planner. It is time indeed to take a bow, Ocean Quigley, for some masterful art direction. The UI makes perfect sense as well, and everything has a sleek, refined sort of look. This is a game that is a pleasure to watch.
"I have a question."
"Go on."
"This place. Buildings. Skyscrapers. Everything. I walk up to them and they look toy-town size. Why? Some sort of surrealist statement? Emphasising the unreal nature of an international community toeing the line to some hidden idealogical deity? A make believe topsy-turvey 'Alice-in-Wonderland' environment?"
"No. It's the tilt-shift effect. You can switch it off if you like."
"Oh."
"Pair of tinted spectacles?"
"Rose tinted I assume?"
"No, they thoughtfully give you a variety of different pleasing looks to suit the city to your tastes."
"Oh. Right."
"Question No. 27,886."
"Go on."
"Why do you keep talking in short abrupt sentences. Are you William Shatner?"
"I am not a Shatner. I am a free man!"
"HA HA HA HA HA HA!"
The datalayers make it an especial joy. You can look up any sort of fluctuating statistic and see how it is affecting your city in real time. It is implemented wonderfully, and is oddly soothing to watch.
"With this console I can observe every facet of your tiny little lives, No. 27,886."
"Why is the monitor always stuck on watching the sewage flow make amusing parp noises then? I guess even the No.1's and 2's are kept track of, around here."
"Silence, No. 27,886!"
So you lay down your curvy roads, build up your town and pick a specialisation. The limited size of the city actually enforces a sort-of-interesting play mechanic in which you have to choose a certain goal for your city. Perhaps a dirty mining town, or a low-down gambling mecca. It’s kind of fun, but you are left wishing that you had more space and more options to really build up a detailed city around it. Once completed, you then build another city inside the region complementing it with a different speciality, and so on. The game encourages you to play with other people, but there’s nothing to stop you setting up a private server and treating it as a single player game.
Unless the server is down of course, or the internet done up and gone away. To be honest, despite the horrific frustration of the opening launch week this isn’t too big of a deal-breaker for me. The only way in which it rankles is that there was a mountain of lies built up around it – more of which later.
So you’ve got a cute little city of say five thousand sims tootling along and you’re feeling mighty proud and protective of it. You zone some more residential, slap down a school and next thing you know you’ve spent another three hours in game and are pondering where to plop the ferry. It’s a good indicator of how addictive SimCity can be, and how the magic is to some degree still there. You glance down at the population figure, now that your city has doubled in size.
Hold on! What’s this – fifty thousand sims? Where the hell did they come from? Where do they live? Is everyone living in triple-bunkbed city or something or what?
It’s here where my first big frustration with SimCity comes in. In SimCity 4 you had a linear progression of population that made sense compared to what you were seeing. In SimCity you don’t-know-what-the-fuck. This is all down to ‘population-fudging’, where the population is apt to double, triple and quintuple itself and more depending on certain numbers hit. Now to me, that’s lazy. Very lazy. And also somewhat gutless. Fact is Maxis that I had resigned myself to building a small town that labelled itself in that cute American way as a city. But there’s no way that I can look at a small CBD and a couple of little suburbs and think that such a place houses two hundred thousand people and more. It immediately disassociates myself from what I have built and shatters the illusion that I have created a living, breathing city. It also makes the high-scoring population tables ludicrously irrelevant.
And that's not the only falsehood the game has to offer. It turns out that sims are in no way persistent. Once they reach a destination they 're-roll' and change names and needs. This isn't such a bad thing at first glance. There's no way the simulation could track the needs and identities of thousands upon thousands of sims. But the trouble kicks in when they have to go to work. Sims head to the nearest job available and if taken, move onto the next. In practice this means a constant, confused, roaving migration of sims cluttering the roads up with indecision. Traffic and pathfinding tweaks have alleviated the problem a little, but it shows how hollow the initial claims of detailed modelling were.
"No. 2! I returned home last night to find some guy who looked like Jake Busey making out with my wife! Also, I turned up to work at the Llama Lunch-In and found I'd been replaced! Hey... wait a minute! You're not No.2!"
“No, we switch jobs and lives around here all the time in SimCity, No. 27,886. In fact I’m very surprised that it’s still your role to be revolutionary-hero-by-proxy-with-a-right-nark-on. Today I am played by George Baker. Tomorrow it might be Paul Eddington. Get used to it. And please stop barking!”
“Wait until the Actor’s Guild hears about this!” (Stomps out accompanied by more thunder.)
Make no mistake, watch SimCity at play and you will be pleasantly gulled by the appearance of an organic world where knock-on-effects rule and life of a sort seems to flourish. One's first glance in playing SimCity is quite a lengthy and enjoyable one, with lots of little surprises to uncover and great delight to be found in watching the little wheels turn. It's this up-front joy that garnered such positive early reviews and strong previews for the game. But take a peek under the hood and you'll find that all is not well in SimCity. Fire-engines form conga-lines and tend to a small trailer home for upwards of a day whilst ignoring a giant petro-chemical facility going up in smoke. So called server-syncing means that gifts sent by truck to other cities are frequently waylaid by invisible bandits, at best turning up ridiculously late, by which time the city's problem has either been fixed or been the ruination of all.
Worst of all are the parks. It turns out that deep down, in this supposedly complex game, all people really want are parks. They don't even need jobs. Just give 'em a see-saw and a marjory-daw and you're their new master. (I have no idea what a marjory-daw is.) When I started the game I accepted the premise of all-residential cities knowing that they frequently make up satelite communities of industrial cities. But it is with weary disgust that I discover that you can have a region entirely made up of purely residential cities. Not that you'd want to of course, because that would be tedious. But soon as you are made aware of such short-cuts the gold quickly loses its lustre. Worse still, it was the assumption that all these complex calculations were what made the small city size limits just. Now we discover that the game - incredibly - was programmed only for single core computing, something that strikes me as astonishingly amateur hour post 2009.
And so when a player's city goes tits up they're left with the horrible uncertainty of not knowing whether it was something they did wrong, or some inherent flaw in the coding. Frequently it is actually the player's fault for not thinking things through fully, but with a game like SimCity transparency and intuition is a must - otherwise you never feel in actual control. It's a shame, as if you stick to playing SimCity as a little toy-town piece of creative visual beauty you can still get a lot of fun - especially if you stay away from the tedium of gridded roads. There's some genuinely pleasant fun I had just creating little sleepy American towns. But if you want more... well... gngh. Let's hope that one day they actually make a patch that fixes things, right?
"Free! Free! You are all free!"
"What are you doing, No. 27,886!"
"Me and my groovy counter-culture pals have taken over, grandaddy-o, and now we're putting an end to this authoritarian farce by running around doing beat-poetry, dancing, speaking gibberish and shooting people to pop-hits of the sixties. Then he runs up to a console and starts hitting Disaster Generating buttons and Faux-Godzilla looms up over the horizon.
"Ha ha! Bad luck No. 27,886! I'll just rebuild the city again. After all, much like EA I've plenty of money saved up!"
"Not if I do this!"
"No, not the cable!"
With a casual tug No. 27,886 pulls out the internet cable, causing the server to lose connection.
"No! A bug! I've lost my rollback state!"
"You're losing more than that, crumbum!" And No. 27,886 reaches out and tugs at the English Character Actor's face...
"No! My beautiful jowly face!"
The mask of No.2 is ripped off to reveal lovable Ocean Quigley. But that too is a mask and is ripped off to reveal sinister EA guru Lucy Bradshaw. Which is in turn ripped off to reveal Kieron Gillen. Which is in turn ripped off to reveal you, the gamer, who is merely ripped off.
In terms of enjoyment I had, I honestly have to say that on a usual reading of the game I'd award it as high as 6. But in light of the bungling so far it's a 5 - and with the spectre of advertising brought on by the Nissan DLC (what, over 1 million copies sold not enough, EA?) it's a very sour-tasting 5.
I hope and pray they patch and fix this up into something special six months or so now. But I'm not holding my breath. Apologies for the preview cheerleading folks, but looks like I was gulled again by Maxis. It's not as bad as Spore, but it's still a disappointment.
5/10
_________________
"Peter you've lost the NEWS!"
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is the review everyone should have waited on before giving EA any money.
