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Sim City Societies

themcman

Posted in Reviews on December 21, 2007 at 5:23 pm

SimCity Societies is meant to be a continuation of the popular SimCity series. However, after playing through just the tutorial, I decided that this wasn’t really a sequel, more of a completely different game.

SimCity Societies offers a different way of gaming compared to its predecessor, SimCity 4. Instead of having to zone areas, and manage a large city and the region around it, you have to micromanage and create individual buildings.

The game is based around six different ‘societal values’:

‘Production’, ‘Prosperity’, ‘Creativity’, ‘Spirituality’, ‘Authority’ and ‘Knowledge’

The idea is that certain buildings require different values, and certain values generate other values. Every building consumes or produces at least one of these. Houses and workplaces generally ‘use’ values, while decorations and venues generate. On paper it sounds good, but it doesn’t really work in the game. You find yourself often having to place many of the same decorations in a ‘block’ so that other buildings function.

Houses offer so many ‘job ready’ people, which is often a small percentage of the population in the house. Workplaces offer so many job places, and at the end of the working day, inject some money into the treasury, as well as often ‘taking’ some of a Sim’s happiness. Decorations just generate a ‘societal value,’ normally just one of the above. Venues change Sims happiness, often from bad or OK to good.

The happiness of the Sims in your town is generally down to the buildings you place. Don’t place enough venues, and you’ll get rogue Sims intent on tearing down your city or Sims playing Hooky and not going to work. Place enough venues and you will have a city full of contented Sims who are happy with life.

Graphics:

The graphics are generally good, although the decorations start to get a bit repetitive after a while. There are all the options in the settings that you could ever want…

· Shadow detail

· Texture detail

· Reflections

· Anti-aliasing

· Terrain detail

· Particle level

· Filtering

· Rear clipping plane

· Detail clipping

· Map apron detail

· Lighting quality

· Shaders

On / Off – Bloom & Specular

Most of these go from Low -> High, but a few can be turned off or set to Ultra.

After finding out what some of these meant (filtering – clarifies and sharpens object in the distance, rear clipping plane – changes the distance at which objects become visible to the camera), I looked to the minimum specifications.

• CPU – 1.7 GHz XP, 2.4 GHz Vista
• RAM – 512MB XP, 1GB Vista (yeah right)
• Hard Drive – 2.1GB
• GPU – 128MB DX9c

To begin with, I thought SimCity Societies was a terrible game overall. However, after playing on it for a few hours, I realised it wasn’t a rubbish game, it just looks rubbish in comparison with it’s elder brothers.

• Sim City Societies
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