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Broken?

Some things about SimCity 4 leave the bitter taste of premature release in our mouths. Crime, for example, never really gets out of hand. The only time it started affecting a city’s population was in a ‘ghetto’ scenario where there weren’t enough jobs to go around. In an educated city, a police department is a waste, unless one wishes to stop the news ticker from complaining. Those 20 crimes per month in a city of 35,000 don’t sound right.

Financial difficulties aren’t a problem at all if the player decides to use the old SimCity trick of raising taxes before building the city. Unlike previous titles however, SimCity 4’s sims won’t stop migrating to the city after a certain population level – it never becomes necessary to lower taxes unless you build a nearby town with a lower tax level.

Ah the seaport

My name is Jack Defacto, you didn't pay your taxes, prepare to die

Boom hehe

The advertised multiplayer doesn’t work – it hasn’t been implemented yet. My Sim mode is almost, but not quite completely useless. Sometimes it’s amusing try to drop a meteor on My Sim’s home or workplace, but usually the most use he receives is when the player wishes to figure out why a specific neighborhood is dying. Of course, My Sim only provides vague hints, not actual reasons why suddenly the best zones in Nu Jack City are becoming decrepit.

There are plenty of fancy new graphs and charts which seem like a great idea at first. The RCI (Residential/Commercial/Industrial) demand indicators work as always, though they now provide detailed information about what kind of RCI the sims want. The status map also indicates which areas are desirable for which RCI. High-tech industry is going to be more picky than manufacturing, which is more picky than Dirty industry which will move in anywhere. Where the problem comes in is that even if there are empty industrial zones in a highly desirable place for high-tech, they won’t move in. The chart is either wrong or the game isn’t following its own rules.

Strange stuff

Some areas will have abnormally low health or education levels, even though they’re right by a properly funded facility. Abandoned buildings will loiter and the AI is extremely reluctant to demolish them itself in favor of new ones. If the player taxes dirty industry out of town, the buildings will simply become abandoned and never replaced. What is even worse is that they still pollute even when shut down! So in addition to dealing with power plants or water pumps that produce less for more money as they age, money-sucking parks and amenities, and ever-more-expensive garbage disposal, the player ends up having to spend thousands to bulldoze ruins. Where’s the private initiative in the city?

Nice crater

Awww water problems

They're gonna need more than water to cool that

Oh that’s right, the private initiative is to lay down worthless roads as the player tries to zone. Residential auto-roads never match up to commercial and neither match with industrial. This leaves the player with the choice of either tediously making his own, small zones with his own roads, or deleting the auto-roads and re-zoning appropriately. Of course, at the risk of vicious traffic snarls, one can leave the quagmire of alternating T-intersections in place.

We haven’t even mentioned the performance problems the game has, the poor interface (where is the scroll speed adjustment?) or missing features that are seriously needed – like restoring zones in a region to their original shape. It’s pretty easy to screw up a city design; so we imagine people would like to restore the zone or even the entire region without having to manually copy over files.