SimCity for the iPhone is not all that bad, but EA Games has some (read: a lot of) work to do. It is pretty impressive graphically, and controlling the city with the touch screen is actually easier than on a laptop’s track pad (which is why I lasted only twenty minutes playing SimCity 4).
The game has all the typical features, the zoning, the rewards, the annoying advisors. It’s fun to kill time with, especially when I don’t feel like getting my ass kicked by Deep Green, or watching the CPU steal my chips on trip nines after the flop by tossing one of its players trip kings on the last card.
Ah, but there are issues, issues aplenty.
First off is the lack of a subway system. If they can work in the water pipes, they could have added subways. The only other two mass transit options are buses and railroads. Railroads are space wasting garbage, whereas subway stations take up the same land area as bus stations. So in my city, I had to sprinkle bus stations everywhere (once they were available in the 1930′s). Here’s the thing: no matter how many I built, Sims were whining about not being able to get to work, and how many passengers per day were these stations servicing? Zero. How is that?
Highways are also absent, which is dumb, but not as bad as the lack of subterranean trains snaking beneath the masterly crafted city on the surface. At least I got to put up the Empire State Building.
Another missing feature is the ability to check your mayoral approval rating by clicking on City Hall. I also am lost without knowing how many pigeons are on my statue. This is a staple, and hopefully an easy fix.
I reached a rather annoying point with the petitioners. I had over 200k in my city’s coffers, and my income from business deals and income ordinances was enough to pay for all of my other services and costly ordinances. So in an effort to boost my population, I lowered all three tax brackets to zero. Tax-free. Yet every year I would still get petitioners telling me taxes were too high. I let it slide the first four or five times, but I figured if they were going to bitch either way, I might as well charge the bastards eight percent.
I also had a landfill that was no longer needed, so I cut it off from roads hoping it would decompose. In fifty years, not a bit. How long should it take?
The worst part is the program’s tendency to crash. At one point, I had to do a hard reset of my phone just to get the app to run again. At another, I lost over 30 years of work to a crash. Apparently the autosave feature only works when it damn well pleases. I’ll save more often in the future, but that takes a good minute to complete.
Paying $10 for a game should absolve the owner of the frustration of crashing software, but I guess not.
All in all, it’s an okay game, but I expect the developers at EA to right some of the wrongs (crashes first, please) with this game.
***UPDATE***
I know, I know… how can you “update” a new post? I wrote this about a week ago, so live with it. The game crashes every time in July of 2005, and I started my city back in 1900. 105 years and that is it. Lame.
Fantastic review. I agree with all of your observations, even in version 1.3.0.
Below is a comment I posted on another site. Hopefully someone from EA will read this…
I’ve been playing a lot. started in 1950 with -10,000 and now am in 1964 with 450,000 residents and lots of cash. I’m enjoying it but found the game to be very buggy, even at 1.3.0. Here are some of my observations, would love to see if others share the problems:
1. Autosave sucks. Hardly works. It crashes frequently and then you lose all progress. Same thing happens with incoming calls.
2. Worse still, if I had a new reward building available it’ll become unavailable forever if the autosave failed. Let me explain: suppose I built a stadium in 1961 and then the game crashed. When I restart I’m in 1959 again, but I will not have the stadium option ever again. The ticker will anounce residents want it, but rewards will have no buildings available. (same happened with stock exchange, theme park etc).
3. I get 0 passengers on all mass transit no matter what I do
4. Landfills are not filling but residents all have green trashcans and complain about lack of waste disposal. This was only solved when I put incinerators in.
5. (this has been a PC problem as well). Leveling terrains is not an option, and lots of times roads/railroads get funky, especially when trying to connect across hills – you can lose access to bridges etc.
Aside from that, even in large the game map is too small. My city is pretty much done at this stage.
I feel it could have been an awesome game, but now it’s just frustratingly buggy. I probably spent 15 hours on it, and at least 50% of the time I had to replay crashes and such.