SimCity impressions: We waited ten years for this? (GOOD article) not worth the buy save your monies

[DainBramaged]

Last edited Mon Mar 4, 2013, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

It's not every day you get a proper new title in the SimCity series. In fact, it's been a bit over ten years since SimCity 4 last showed us what it was like to control the fate of a vast metropolis (Socities and Sim City Social notwithstanding). So it's fair to say that our expectations were high as we sat down with final release code for the new game, which launches in the US tomorrow. Even without access to the full global servers, which EA hasn't turned on yet, we were excited to try promised new features like undulating curved roads, government buildings with snap-on expansions, and a regional commodity system that lets you buy and sell excess resources.

After spending around a dozen hours each playing the game this weekend, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright (who considers himself a bit of a SimCity die-hard) and I (Gaming Editor Kyle Orland) were pretty disappointed with what we found. What follows is edited excerpts from the various conversations we had over instant messaging this weekend, discussing how we were finding our initial time with the game. We'll have a more detailed review later when we've had a chance to try out the final release, complete with all the globally connected, Internet-enabled features EA has been playing up, but just going by first impressions, maybe EA shouldn't have messed with its successful city building formula quite so much.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited-ten-years-for-this/