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SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition Review
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Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
Find all Electronic Arts reviews
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Platform(s): Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
Release Date: September 22, 2003
Average Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
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Retail Price: $19.99
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User Submitted SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition Reviews
Date: 2008-09-25
Greatest SimCity to date
SimCity 4 is, by far, the greatest city-building game yet released. It wraps up all that is good from the previous SimCity games, puts a nice 3d look on everything, and adds complexity and features in just the right places.
For the builders, SC4 does not disappoint. It really gives a good sense of a thriving city. Buildings are constructed in a very wide range of size and style, pedestrians walk the streets, car get into accidents, smog settles over the heavily industrialized areas, trees sway in the breeze, and waves roll up and down the beaches. There is a slew of unlockable buildings and real-world landmarks to spruce up and personalize your town. And even more stuff is available online when you've exhausted everything the game has to offer. Even the disasters are beautiful! Time was, you needed a pretty sweet PC to handle the game. Nowadays the required hardware is pretty standard stuff and it still looks great.
Other features help the player out too: things like elimination of power lines, automatic street placement, lots of charts / graphs / map overlays to ease analysis, improved pipelaying, etc. all help streamline the game and fix some of the worst annoyances in previous incarnations.
The primary challenge of SimCity 4 is balancing. There is so much complexity in the game, and much of your time is split between building up the city, balancing out the budget, and finding some way to manage all the problems that plague every major metropolis. Some players are turned off by this as it can be frustrating to contend with all the issues. I personally get a great deal of satisfaction when, for example, I sink a bunch of cash into an urban renewal project and actually manage to revitalize main street without everyone running for the hills. The modeling of real-world city growth is astonishing, and your cities will go through all the stages on the path from tiny manufacturing town to major commercial metropolis. A tell-tale sign of the enormity of scale is that the official strategy guide to the game is the size of a textbook!
SimCity 4: Deluxe Edition comes with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which adds a bunch of features I didn't care about and one absolutely indispensable button: the "transportation query" tool. It shows you utilization of your roads, and how your citizens get from point A to point B. Without it, managing road maintenance and upgrades is nearly impossible. You now have the ability to (for example) click a factory, see where most workers are coming from, and set up bus stations from start to finish that will actually see utilization. Public transit made manageable at last! The U-Drive-It missions and Add A Sim features are pretty useless, though they can give a nice tour of the town. Thankfully you can turn them off and get back to the business of city planning.
There are downsides to the game. Micromanaging funding for all your various buildings gets tedious fast. Who wants to manually set bus funding for a dozen elementary schools across the city? Unfortunately there's not much of a clue that the budget needs adjustment until your teachers go on strike or you start having blackouts. And the regions system, while interesting, just ends up getting abused to funnel all the garbage to one tiny landfill town. Another problem is that it is possible to lose the game - not so difficult early on, but when your city is sucking down millions of dollars each month in expenses, a single disaster can wreck your cash flow and cause you to lose instantly. Disappointing to say the least! (Some third-party addons help stop some of the worst offenses: check Google for the Network Add-on Mod and see if that suits your needs)
If you're a fan of city builders at all, you owe it to yourself to give SimCity 4 Deluxe a chance. It is the current king of city-builders, can easily consume hours of your life, and still has a wide fanbase despite being released about five years ago. Highly recommended.
Date: 2008-09-19
Sim City has come a LOOOONG way!
My first SimCity came free with a computer I had purchased in the 90's. It was fun... but WOW! The graphics on this and the options are amazing. My 10 year old loves this game. Some days he builds cities, others he builds islands with volcano's and releases God's fury on them... lightning, eruptions, meteors, robots, dinosaurs... lots of fun!
Date: 2008-09-18
Simulation for hours and hours
This game has lots of options in order to build a city. It isn't easy though to make it grow as you must keep an eye to the funds available.
It is nice to connect different cities and create a metropolitan area. This takes out the restriction for building large cities.
The rush hour expansion lets you to explore the city at a ground level. This makes perfect sense as it emphasizes on how the transportation system you build for the city affects the traffic and therefore the well-being of the citizens.
This game provides fun for hours and hours as you learn how to balance the sims' satisfaction and the budget.
On the system requirements, it is good to know that the game doesn't demand high specs.
Date: 2008-08-08
Very enjoyable
I think the game is very well done, and I received it in good condition. Play it often.
Date: 2008-08-02
Crazy Complexity
I have to say, when i bought this game i was expected a so-so game i would get bored of after a month or so. But this game is so fun and addicting because of its sheer complexity
The Deluxe version is completely worth it, allowing you a grasp at your city's traffic network. At any building or home, you can see exactly how many people leave the home during the day, where they go to work, how they get to work, and how long it takes them. From this information you can figure out the best way to organize your cities and streets to minimize traffic congestion.
Also, region play is fun and interesting. Instead of individual cities you can play with like in the old sim city, you can customize a whole region (Which means many cities all connected)! You can create a city and add roads that go connect to the adjacent city and then go work on that city and see the effects the to cities have on each other.
Also with the Deluxe edition comes a U Drive It part of the game. You can actually drive your cars around the city in 3rd person and do missions and things to see how hard it is for the school bus to get all the kids just using small streets or how fast your taxi cab can drop someone off at the airport. U Drive It, to me at least, is a fun way to see your city and really spend some time with it. Rather that just seeing it as something your building and imagine it as something you could live in.
This is a very fun game and there are some great Modds and downloadable building models out there from simtropolis website. You can download buildings not in the game to customize your city even more. These things can enhance your gameplay.
All in all, a great game. If you don't like having to worry about what types of roads and mass transport is best to move your sims to their jobs you won't like this game. If you don't like to think about the best way to zone residential, commercial, and industrial areas in the way that will make the grow the best. If you don't like having to worry about "rings of influence" around your public buildings such as Hospitals, Schools, and Police, you won't like this game. For those of you who do like this stuff, buy this game and view its complexity yourself, you won't be disappointed.
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