Page 4

Pros:

Graphics. SimCity 4 is easily the nicest-looking Sim game ever. It comes at a price, but once everyone has the hardware to run it properly in three years, we’ll all be glad.
Sound. Decent, if repetitive tunes coupled with typical SimCity sounds make for a fine experience. The sounds aren’t quite up to their predecessors’ legacies, but are more than adequate for the job.
Regions. The regions are a great idea. Building a metropolis piece-by-piece is a fun new challenge.

Shake it baby

Robot landing

That's it, wipe out those abandoned homes

Cons:

Design. One look at the previous two pages gives you an idea of the problems that take this grand sequel down a notch or two… or three or four. Ranging from too much micromanagement to a poor crime model, this doesn’t quite feel like a real SimCity game. For all the promised feedback touted by the developers, the game never seems to indicate why something bad is happening, only that it is.
Unfinished. Multiplayer isn’t done, the interface is missing key features like scroll speed adjustment and region/zone restoration. We’d also like a manual save feature (rather than every time we exit the zone) and about a dozen other options, foremost of which would be the disabling of random disasters like fires.
City AI. The AI that runs your cities in other zones is inadequate – it merely attempts to maintain the status quo. It will agree to any deal whatsoever. It doesn’t build replacement power plants or water pumps. So the city you left in perfect condition, suddenly isn’t so perfect anymore. City deals were fun when you could rip other cities off and trust them to deal with the problem, not when you have to be fair.
City borders. For some reason, cities always seem to end up needing their borders adjusted, which will destroy your buildings on the adjusted parts. It would be simpler adjusting the edges of bordering provinces, but the game doesn’t seem to allow that. Finally, if you build a connection from one zone to another, a piece of road will appear in the other zone that will overwrite anything, including your Statue of Liberty!