SimCity Societies

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $9.99

Features:

• Innovative, modular approach to city-building - choose from more than 350 unique buildings which can be combined, connected and re-arranged in almost limitless combinations.
• Make an artistic city, an industrial one, a police state, or anything you want.
• A new system in SimCity Societies picks up on cultural cues and adjusts lighting, music and the appearance of your city on-the-fly!
• As your city evolves, you'll be able to unlock new buildings to help advance your society.
• System Requirements: DVD drive.

Customer Reviews:

A so-so game [Posted on 2008-06-15]
I ended up selling this game to some one. It's decent and definately has better graphics than the past sim cities. However, I found the game play to be poor and generally boring. Once I created the city, it got boring really fast. I think it could use more mini games or something like that. Buy it and play it. But you may get sick of it quicker than you think.

waste of time [Posted on 2008-06-16]
Overall this game has completely disappointed me. I've been playing Sims 2 and the Civilization series for a very long time and so I've really grown to love management and development games. One of my friends suggested i look into Simcity because it falls in more of a middle area between the two game types.

Unfortunately i started with simcity societies. This game seems like a very simple game where the only real point is to drop random buildings down and try to create one of 6 ideal society types. The buildings have no real relation to one another. For instance if i put a trash collecting plant down it really has no effect on anything especially the cleanliness of the city. If i put a burger joint down versus a tanning salon there is no real difference accept that one may make more money then the other.

You never feel like your managing a living breathing city which really should be the goal. You can't really make any personal touches to anything. And by the end of it all you've earned is a trophy or two that don't give anything worthwhile and an empty feeling that you tend to get after wasting alot of time doing absolutely nothing,

Hopefully this series dies with this one or moves back to its roots and dumps the current development team.

So-So Effort, but not a true Sim City [Posted on 2008-06-27]
The game is probably good for people coming from The Sims line of games who want to try out Sim City for the first time. However, for someone like me that has played the Sim City series from the beginning, it is a huge letdown. If Maxis were still designing the game, they would never have let it fall so far. The game is semi-entertaining for the first 2 or 3 times you play it, but after that it will get very dusty on the shelf.
Technical issues / complaints:
RESOURCE HOG! If your machine has less RAM than a server, and/or a graphics card that is more than a week old, it is probably too weak to really handle this game.
Play DVD. Even with the registration code, you still need to have the DVD in the drive to play the game. This is beyond annoying if you're taking it along on your laptop as a little downtime diversion.
Graphics can get jumpy, and can also develop lines going across the screen.
Even with the latest update, the game still likes to blow up every so often. So, save your city often!

A Hybrid with little depth of play but fun for new gamers [Posted on 2008-07-05]
I have played Sim City and The Sims and liked the idea of building a city based on community values. But this is more of a pretty construction set than a challenging game. First there is no depth to that promised value system. You can put in lots of temples and churches, Orwellian interrogation sites or get heavy into high rises, but you the game play does not differ significantly from one value system to the next. Buildings give or take away points and you are forced to do silly things like insert a ridiculous number of fountains or Real estate offices in order to get enough Prosperity points to build seemingly unrelated items like golf courses, restuarants and hair salons. Adding three fountains to build a hair salon isn't very challenging.

I was hoping that you could stipulate a series of values and let them determine how the people reacted, rather than just building pretty cities. As mentioned in another review, as long as the power is on, you can build a huge city with no water treatment plant, sewerage system or garbage collection. The idea behind the game is a good one but I think combining that idea with the Sim City format was not. The game concept would work much better as an interactive adventure where you play a character and interact directly with citizens to learn how to navigate in their society.

The game ran pretty well on my system but the auto saves were annoying as they occur often and completely halt game play while the program writes to disk. I also found the road tool to be problematic as it seldom correctly reads a simple turn, creating instead a small maze of roadways.

I bought the game yesterday, played it for about 4 hours and the result of that is a medium sized city, lots of medals that don't mean much and a crew of happy citizens. I used the tutorial to start and then built the majority on my own using the "normal" level of difficulty. Since I don't have gigs to burn on my hard drive, I will probably take this game off by tomorrow and end up passing it on to a family member. If you are new to gaming and want to have some fun I highly recommend it as it is much easier to do well in this game than either Sims or Sim City. You can even use it to teach your young kids about living "green," showing them firsthand the effects of pollution and overcrowding.

If you are a serious gamer not into teaching children, you will likely get bored very quickly and should probably skip this one.

Don't go near this game. [Posted on 2008-07-15]
ok, so, theres not much i can say about this game. mainly because it wont start up! i have all the system requirements. i'm running windows XP media center edition. i'm on patch #5 already and it still won't start up. unfortunately, i didn't read the other reviews about this game before i got it and i'm sad that I didn't. and their tech support is no help whatsoever. they have nothing in there about this error. trust me, i checked everywhere. and it won't uninstall. well, thats spelling out *Virus like Software!* right there. i heard theres alot of other bugs with this game. so i'm sure that evem if i do just happen to get it running, something else is bound to happen. so, basically, i really can't recommend this game at all.

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