When I heard that EA was promoting its new SimCity Social spin-off with the tagline "More City, less Ville," I hoped against hope that the game might actually break the deeply entrenched, deeply annoying social gaming mold set by Zynga's ultra-popular, ultra-simple Facebook games like FarmVille. It's hard to think of an established, well-respected gaming franchise with more potential to bring a bit of deep simulation, complex strategy, and gameplay variety to the world of popular Facebook games.

After playing around with the SimCity Social beta for a few days now, though, I'm a little gobsmacked by how much that potential has been wasted. Given how satisfied the game is to ape the conventions set by Zynga's CityVille without adding any significant gameplay elements from its namesake, the tagline "More City, less Sim" would probably be more accurate for SimCity Social.

Like other SimCity games, Social gives players a relatively free hand to contract their cities with their own preferred mix of housing, businesses, and industry. Here, though, the decisions end up being more cosmetic than really meaningful to the city's operation. In any other SimCity game, each decision would be laden with consequences and tradeoffs that ripple down through a series of interrelated systems: More industrial zoning might mean more jobs and taxes, but also more pollution and crime; a fire station might help protect the citizens, but also place a drain on a limited budget.

But there are no real negative consequences to any of your decisions in Social. Sure, some decisions end up being better than others—one business might produce more money than another in the same amount of time, for instance—but even the most inefficient business will turn you into a millionaire with enough patience. The only real strategy to speak of is an incredibly basic min-maxing, to find the mix of buildings and decorations that will provide the most money and goods within the limited constraints of space and time. Past that, playing the game is really about mindlessly clicking on your buildings when they're ready to be "harvested" for money and goods, building more when you have the resources, and watching your numbers go up and up and up.

The lack of any potential for failure in SimCity Social sucks all the satisfaction out of carefully building a city. This seems to be an inherent limitation in a large number of social games. I suppose that's because imposing negative consequences would necessarily lead to the risk of catastrophic failure, which might cause players to stop playing. And if someone isn't playing SimCity Social, it means they aren't a potential customer for Diamonds, the in-game uber-currency that can turn your real money into anything from building permits to time-saving "accelerations" to the "Simoleans" needed to build most everything in the city. That's right, if you want more money in SimCity Social, you don't have to worry about calibrating your tax rate or even waiting for your existing buildings to produce more. You just have to spend real money to make fake money.

Outside of that, you're basically just rearranging your city like a glorified doll house, making it as aesthetically pleasing as possible for when your neighbors visit. This is the most "social" part of SimCity Social. To the game's credit, it does its best to make the interactions feel a little more meaningful through a goofy friend or foe system. When you click on your neighbor's apartment building, for instance, you can choose to grease their doorstep and earn some ire, or invite them to a sleepover and earn some friendliness. The resulting resources you get for each action are the same, but leaning heavily on the negative side earns you the ability to leave your friends prank gifts like pooping birds (which is as close as this game comes to fun).

For the most part, though, friends in SimCity Social are less people to play with and more ciphers to use as virtual chattel for your goals. One of the early "events" in the game, for instance, sees a UFO crashing non-threateningly in the remote outskirts of town. To remove it, you need to invite friends to staff science team positions like ET Linguist and Physicist. Not sure who to invite? Don't worry, the game will happily suggest 50 Facebook friends to pester, many of whom probably aren't even playing the game and will no doubt resent your wall spam.

Such staffing doesn't require any real sacrifice on your friends' part— when they start up the game, they, like you, will likely be bombarded with dozens of random requests for help or virtual goods. They'll mindlessly click through without thinking and without having to spend any of their in-game resources.

The sheer simplicity of this social transaction means there's no real connection created by helping a friend. It just becomes another chore, a business relationship where a few clicks and a minimum of attention is all that's being asked of either party. Of course, if you don't want to pester your friends (or don't have any), you can skip the whole thing by spending your real money on Diamonds, letting determined players pay to "solo" through some of the tougher goals.

When SimCity Social does make efforts towards true simulation, the results are almost laughable. Citizens will occasionally express anger or happiness over some incidental bit of city construction, for instance, but either way the comments can be dismissed simply by sending a virtual gift to the player represented by the citizen avatar. Fires will occasionally break out among your citizens' homes, but luckily they won't start until you've built your first fire house, and even then there's no real risk that your single fire engine won't be able to cover the entire town for a good long while. There are some businesses that can spew pollution into town as well, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out any concrete effects from all that smog.

When judged by the relatively low standards of CityVille clones, SimCity Social actually isn't a half-bad example of the form. There are plenty of building types to rearrange, brightly colored shiny things to click on, and entertaining sound effects to listen to. But the SimCity name writes a check that this game simply can't cash.