Developer: Tilted Mill Entertainment
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Gaming Style: Empire Building
Interwebzsite: http://simcitysocieties.ea.com/index.php
System Requirements:
Windows XP SP2, or Windows Vista, 1.7 GHz Intel CPU, or AMD XP 2100 processor, 512 MB RAM memory, 2.1 GB free hard disk drive space, 128 MB video card, DVD drive, DirectX 9.0-compatible video card. (Windows Vista requires a 2.4 GHz processor or equivalent and 1 GB RAM)
ESRB Rating: E10+
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So a couple of weeks ago, I was walking through my local Best Buy and happened to see that there was a new Sim City out, “Sim City: Societies.”
It is a revisited Sim City, although yes you attempt to make monies to build your city, its not to build it for profit, its to build it to make it more livable, or unlivable. You can rule with an iron fist, or as a “nice guy.”
The game is simple, keep your sims happy, or they will actually revolt against you. There are stunning graphics!
The water actually reflexes the building, and landscape!
You can check out some screenies here
What I find is nice about the game is that the interface is amazingly easy to work with. At first I was a little surprised because it wasn’t the normal Sim City type interface, of design a zone for businesses/home/corporations, you actually build the buildings themselves.
The buildings control different aspects of the game: productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge. Each one of these counter acts one of the others, so to maintain a balanced city it takes planning, or you can just be a terrible leader and rule in an authoritarian fashion and be a Nazi of society.
There are awards you can attempt to receive by accomplishing certain feats such as having a medium city, with your city using 200 productivity and having a large percentage of the people happy, and the awards give you stats just as the buildings do. I have received “Sheriff” which gives me monies for the day, although not a lot it helps. Each award has its own characteristics to help your city just as the buildings do.
The buildings in Societies consist of house/living places, jobs, entertainment (venues), and scenery/decorations. They all play an important role in the game, house give places for your sims to live, so they can go get a job, to make you money, and if they
don’t like where they live because of the lack of entertainment or scenery they will revolt, thus not earn you any money.
Although this wasn’t developed by Maxis, the original makers of Sim City, there is still a nice feel for it. It does give a different spin to the game.
I found that the best strategy as in the originals, was to create power plants away from the city, to cut down on the smog. and section off businesses, homes/venues. It helps really well with happiness of your Sims.
I caused them to revolt today, I pushed them overboard on making me money… I placed too many Oil Refineries, and they got pissed revolted and shut it down. It lost me 1400 simoleons… totally pissed me off, that could have been a new house to make some more money
Although there were mixed reviews, I am disregarding them and going with what I say. Over all i think this game has nice features, like the graphics, but it is about a stones throw away from being like a true Sim City. I would rate this game overall a 7/10, just for the lack of actual difficulty, as in the other Sim City games.
I played this awhile ago. It was fun the first few times, but definately doesn’t have the re-playability of Sims or Sim City. Gets old fast. 7/10 is higher than I give it credit for.