crishy 9

By far the best city builder of this generation and since SimCity 4.



Great graphics, fully 3d engine, and runs smoothly and with few By far the best city builder of this generation and since SimCity 4.



Great graphics, fully 3d engine, and runs smoothly and with few glitches. The traffic/public transport simulation is one of the most addicting aspects of the game, it has a lot of depth and it is addicting spending time building and altering transit lines and building roads (that can be easily curved or elevated/tunneled) in order to increase traffic flow.



The variety of included buildings is decent, and there is a great variety of mods and assets - that are continuously created and updated - that drastically increase gameplay options and provide a much more personalized and enjoyable gaming experience. It is also remarkably easy to install and update them - just a matter of subscribing to them once online. No need to manually download and unpack files. Definitively a key core component of the game.



Unfortunately I cannot give the game a perfect score because it suffers from a big, big drawback: size limitations. Yes, the allowed build-able area is much larger than SC2013, but that is really not saying much. The default 9 obtainable tiles add up to only 36 km squares, only a little more than two large SC4 (which allows for almost unlimited number of tiles at the cost of a shallower game simulation) tiles side by side.



Now, there are mods that increase the maximum allowed number of obtainable tiles from 9 to 25 or even all 81 tiles, but then chances are (especially with the latter) that you will run into hard-coded limitations, such as 65k agents, a one million population limit, and most notably, around 32k road segments and nodes, that will halt to a stop any further growth in your city, very early on, unless you are playing in maps with lots of water and/or mountains. These limits have been imposed by the developers to maintain smooth performance across a wide range of PC configurations, with, sadly, no option for people with PCs that can handle the load to increase said limits. Because of the difficulty (or impossibility) in doing so, no mods have been released dealing with these limits, other than one increasing the number of trees. So caveat emptor.



Also, lack of medium residential density and farming zoning - you must use ordinances to ban growth of skyscrapers or allow farms in industrial zones, tedious at best, Farming is also affected by the fact that zoning is limited to four squares deep (making them look totally out of scale, more than other things in-game other than the airports, which, for that matter, do almost nothing) beyond a road and best done in fertile areas only - basically, needlessly making it a much more complicated affair than in SC4, even with mods, as with these one is forced to manually plop/paint and decorate fields to visually simulate said farms.



Many other minor complaints in vanilla (i.e. deathwaves, must build roadside first, etc.) that are easily fixable with mods.



For the price, 30$ at launch, you cannot beat it though. It is a great bargain. As for the DLCs, I believe all of them are worth as well, except the disasters pack, which I do not own and cannot comment as I never cared for them in any city simulator game. But you do not require them to have an enjoyable experience, or to use user created content, for that matter (other than ones created specifically for content introduced in these DLCs). … Expand