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Holy Father

After selecting one of the zones on the region map, the player can choose to do some terraforming before building the city. As with previous games, before the city starts, sculpting the land is completely free. SC4’s beautiful, full-3D terrain engine is at its best here, as mesas are raised, valleys are sculpted and the forces of erosion create scenic ridges across the terrain. Now is also the time to “reconcile edges”, meaning that the game automatically fixes the edges of the current zone to match those of neighboring ones. Now while any discrepancies introduced by the player during terraforming don’t actually affect gameplay, resolving them does make the region view much nicer.

My review towns

Great, my powerplant got destroyed by a road connection

Uh let's cancel these idiotic deals

Once the city is started, the only use for god mode is to unleash disasters. Disasters are quite something. The meteor and volcano in particular are a sight to behold. Meteors will fall within roughly a one or two block radius of the target, so one can only hope that it takes out ‘My Sim’. Volcanoes, on the other hand, are much more accurate and deadly. They rise out of the ground in a most spectacular fashion, shooting and even spilling lava into the surrounding territory. The amount of lava may be disappointing, but the volcano does quite enough damage. Lightning is the laser-guided bomb of disasters, able to pick out individual homes with ease. The giant robot can actually be guided this time around, until he becomes tired and leaves. In the end though, disasters see little use. It’s no fun unleashing them when there’s really no way to rebuild since no city can possibly withstand the financial strain without massive cash reserves.

Say what? No rebuilding?

SimCity 4 is a tedious exercise in financial restraint. While it’s easy to appreciate the designer’s intention of having players create workable cities, even the best intentions go wrong. Thanks in part to the new economy, SimCity 4 becomes either a bore or a chore. Everything built by the city inflicts a maintenance cost. Want parks? Pay for them. Hospitals? Pay for them. Now, pardon my Canadian sentiments, but I was rather under the impression that a hospital was a private enterprise in America. How one is built by the city, never mind manages to lose money is beyond me.

This leaves players with two basic choices in city design – the ghetto, or the micromanaged hell. The ghetto has few or no schools and medical facilities, one fire department for emergencies, no police departments and absolutely no amenities. It will make money, albeit slowly.

A country club, nice?

Fire fire fire (yet again and again and again)

Why does no one want to live around a country club?!

The micromanaged hell starts off as a slum, but the addition of carefully-placed public centers with strictly controlled budgets lets it grow beyond its humble origins. One “feature” of SimCity 4 is the ability to set the budget of each and every school, hospital, police/fire department and even power plant. But in a misguided attempt to force players to use the “feature”, or perhaps balance it out with respect to the budget, the design team has cut funding so drastically that if your centers aren’t running on the razor’s edge of efficiency, the city will be losing money. Oh joy.