My favorite thing about SimCity has always been watching the rippling effects of my experimental choices. There have been eight bug-fixing updates since its infamous launch, and now all those many details work much more predictably — but it's been hard to get past that initial frustration. It's fitting, then, that its first expansion, Cities of Tomorrow, is looking toward the future. It's a new chance to showcase the intricacy and complexity of the simulation, and although it doesn't always feel new and can be somewhat underwhelming, it’s nicely balanced and improves upon the base game.

Loading

Loading

Cities of Tomorrow’s main additions are three futuristic city specializations: the Academy, OmegaCo, and MegaTowers. The Academy and OmegaCo serve to counteract each other, and it works really well — OmegaCo is an Orwellian, gratuitously polluting mega-corporation that slowly buys out your entire city, while the Academy is a green center for future technologies that help alleviate the problems of depleting resources and pollution. It’s all a bit dystopian, but then again, you’re an omnipotent CEO of a mayor with tyrannical eminent domain powers and control over pretty much everything (except traffic flow), so who are we to talk?The thing about OmegaCo and the Academy, however, is that although they are supposed to be futuristic, they don’t feel all that different from existing specializations. OmegaCo uses oil and ore to manufacture the addictive mystery substance Omega, so the city I built around it was basically a hybrid mining-drilling city except with more neon lights. The Academy, on the other hand, works similarly to the university in that it converts nearby industry to high tech, and the Academy city I built looked a lot like a typical “green” education-focused city. (Side note: the Academy requires high-wealth workers instead of educated ones, which I found to be a bit weird.)My cities didn’t start to feel new until I incorporated the third but by far most interesting specialization, MegaTowers. They’re enormous skyscrapers that you build one level at a time, and because levels can be dedicated to anything from apartments to offices to parks to new technologies, you can customize them to fit your cities’ needs. They don’t make cities physically larger (the small lot size remains woefully unaddressed), but they do let you build up instead of out and can hold large populations, leaving you more space for other things. Plus, if you plan them right, they can even be completely self-sustaining. That way, the Sims living there never have to leave (insert evil mayoral laughter here) and therefore won’t clog up already congested roads. Staying inside forever is the way of the future!MegaTowers make good use of the technology enabled by the Academy and OmegaCo. Drones, which hover above traffic and can replace Sims’ cars and emergency vehicles, can be manufactured at OmegaCo factories. Combined with the “safety” MegaTower level, which deploys emergency drones as needed, they’re more effective and less wasteful, which helps both your traffic and ground pollution. The Academy unlocks pollution-reduction levels and sky bridges to connect MegaTowers to one another. It’s really cool, but the three almost feel too dependent on each other — unlike the old specializations, you can’t do much at all without the others in your city or region. It makes sense for some interconnectedness, but I really couldn’t do much at all with OmegaCo without the Academy’s counteracting technologies.The Academy is especially necessary to manage traffic, since it unlocks the MagLev train. The MagLev is probably the best new traffic tool — the drones are only effective in very large numbers, and putting the necessary factories in takes up quite a bit of space — because you can place the tracks above roads and some buildings. It helps with traffic without taking up any additional real estate, making high-population cities much more manageable.