SimCity game review (2013). SimCity (2013): review Simcity game review

To a resident of a modern city about what is happening inside Simcity it's hard to say something new. Yesterday, homeless people and, they say, maniacs appeared in their favorite park not far from home. There is no police station in the city, one has to rely on the help of neighbors in the district. Not far from the school, idiots from the city government want to set up a dump. From the window of the apartment you can see smog, a supermarket with discounts on toilet paper and box factories. It is not so easy to get out to the dacha: it will take four hours to get stuck in a traffic jam consisting of those who want to do this. Yes, and there is not much rest - in the air around the clock there is a twisting smell of waste that is processed in a wasteland nearby. All in all, Simcity terribly close to reality.

And I'm walking, walking around Moscow

Putting aside the mischief with the picture, it's time to proceed directly to urban planning. First of all, you need to lay roads from the regional highway, then mark the territory along them as residential. Simcity constantly leads the novice mayor by the hand: residents will immediately complain about the lack of electricity and water. Once you build a power plant and a water pump, Sims will require factories and shops - they need somewhere to work and spend their earnings somewhere.

The farther, the faster your village with a couple of hundred rednecks turns first into a mining town, and then, say, into a regional analogue of Las Vegas. The process follows familiar logic. As soon as the mine runs out of coal, expect a mass exodus of laid-off workers. Crime and alcoholism will flourish in a city that lives off casinos and attractions. If next to the water tower is not placed treatment facilities, then over time, the amount of available water around it will noticeably decrease.

SimCity: Connecting People

Building a dream city that does not need outside help is a thankless task. It is better to take advantage of the advertised opportunities of the new Simcity: build another city, which, for example, will supply the entire region with electricity and water. Workers from this city will be able to visit shops and schools in other cities. Missing services like ambulance and garbage collection can also be bought inexpensively from neighbors.

Awareness of the breadth of potential opportunities comes pretty quickly. Simcity offers to start from a small region with a capacity of 3 cities, but does not prohibit immediately starting with a huge one, which can already fit 16. more fun.

Each mayor has many options for specializing the city: low-tech or high-tech production, extraction of natural resources, tourism, education... The city-planning orgy culminates in regional projects - super-expensive structures that give huge bonuses to all cities in the area (for example, a giant solar power plant). In a region with 16 cities, as many as 4 of these can be placed, and millions will have to be spent on this.

Review connection error

All this is wonderful and exciting on one condition - when the game works. And she still often refuses to do this. Actually, only thanks to the underlying server, on which my region with several cities is located, in each of which many hours of play have been invested, I took up this text. It would seem difficult to screw up with the launch of an online game in this day and age, but EA and Maxis succeeded.

I don’t want to remember and restore the chronology of the disaster, I will say this: the launch now seems not so bad. It was possible to fight evil the very next day after the start of sales, while the heroes did not lose experience and equipment due to errors on the servers. AT Simcity everything is much worse. The game was downright covered in resin and feathers of technical problems.

I am writing this on March 10th, five days after the game launched in the US. During those five days, Maxis had to increase the number of servers by 120% (look at the inability to predict demand - or just plain greed?) and disable some features of the game to reduce the load. And if you can safely continue building without a disabled leaderboard system, then the “temporarily” disabled maximum game speed infuriates you incredibly. “Temporarily” it was turned off, it seems, three days ago, and for three days now the game can only be used as an expensive screensaver - at an average speed, the results of your work have to wait a long time.

Here are some more examples of how Simcity upset you: cities suddenly “break” and become inaccessible; in most cases, the in-game interface does not see friends from Origin; the exchange of resources between cities lags terribly. Messages like "Unable to create a city. Try to create a city again” is the least that can happen. Right now, I'm standing in a half-hour queue for a server (which is marked with a green "Available" sign) with my cities - somehow I don't want to start from scratch on other servers.

EA has taken a new height in the anti-consumer race: the anti-piracy protection has worked one hundred percent, but for a week now many honest buyers have not been able to use the purchased product. So let's do it like this. The rating that you will see under this review can only be considered relevant when the servers are stable. And in this moment buying a SimCity is buying a forty dollar headache.

[On the server Europe Vostok 3, where I play, since Saturday (March 9) everything has been working almost normally, including the maximum speed of the game. From time to time there are disconnections with the server, requiring a restart of the game, but all cities are saved normally. Server fiascoEA/ Maxiswas really loud, but now everything is not so catastrophic - approx. ed.]

A mounth later. The excitement around SimCity is gradually subsiding, the game servers are starting to come out of a coma. If you did not become a victim of an advertising campaign and did not pre-order the game for the full price, not only did you save money, but also saved your nerves: Electronic Arts imposed a permanent Internet connection on users, but, like Blizzard, could not cope with the influx of players .

For several weeks, the local analogue of "error 37" did not allow honest buyers to enter the game and see what they paid money for - the servers could not cope with the load. The publisher reacted not in the best way, cutting down the game functionality, and offered the victims a free game from their catalog, albeit with a very limited choice. However, now all these troubles are behind us. Maybe.

- When I worked at the C-SBC, I looked at the top of the Presidium and said to myself: “I will climb there someday.” But I never got in, as many as one hundred and thirty-seven prohibitions, alas.
- Did you have to seek their cancellation?
- Not. I just decided not to care about them.
"Mass Effect 3" (2012)

Second impression

To the credit of Electronic Arts, the game did not give up to the last. As it turned out, SimCity, pre-loaded back in early March, was not installed at all, and in order to get to the powers of the city manager, it is worth updating the game (read, download it all) through the in-game loader - in best traditions cheap MMOs.

Why the game has an Origin client, if it is not automatically updated through it, is a mystery, only the small size of the distribution kit pleases (2.21 gigabytes), so in a few hours the game loaded and gave the green light to launch. But the problems did not end there: half of the servers got bogged down in technical work, it was not possible to get through to the other due to “overpopulation”, although it was in the dead of night.

The game is on the mend, but the problem with the servers still reminds of itself.

The next morning, the game launched and didn't even crash in the main menu due to an authentication error. The joy of a small triumph was overshadowed only by an eerie introductory video: a camera flight over a prosperous metropolis in a PC-exclusive 2013 is closer in quality to mobile platforms than to canonical 1080p.

It was not possible to look around the menu: the interface helpfully offered to understand the basics and undergo training. The advice should not be neglected, because the previous game in the series, "SimCity: City with Character", was released back in 2007, so it's nice to refresh old memories and understand new developments, and a city-building simulator is not a shooter to rush into battle, not looking at the control layout.

Any work must be paid. In our case, achievements.

Our journey will begin not with a bulldozer and drawings, but with a well-equipped town. The former mayor, such and such a person, ruined the economy and naturally lost his post, leaving us the right to sort out the situation. You should not count on difficulties in the training mission: miraculously, thousands of simoleons (local currency) appeared in the treasury, capable of covering all expenses.

The first commandment of the city planner is that the head is dear to everything, although not in the literal sense. If the city is not connected to the outside world (the entrance to the highway is not laid), residents will not come to it, the population will not grow, and the creation of a hermit commune is not provided in the game. Now it will not be possible to erect buildings somewhere in the wilderness: construction is available only along the highway.

By the way: roads are divided into streets and avenues. If you don't want problems with traffic jams in the future, on early stages lay at least medium-density avenues: if desired, they can be improved by providing tram tracks, but turning a street into an avenue will no longer work.

Roads affect private homes and businesses. If you don't build avenues, skyscrapers will never grow.

Democracy is flourishing in our town - the inhabitants themselves will share their problems, just click on the speech icon. The summer resident will notify us of his brother's desire to settle nearby, but the trouble is - the residential area is not marked out: draw a decree, Mr. Mayor, and the problem is solved. In such a friendly and unobtrusive atmosphere, all communication with the lower classes takes place.

Some of the buildings, be it a cottage, a factory or a hotbed of office plankton, as in the early games of the series, are not born out of thin air - you mark the ground, after which the truck will deliver the materials to the construction site and people will start work. Is it worth reminding you that you won't build anything without a highway exit? The game has become more like a simulator: if in SimCity of 2007 you assembled the city, as if in a LEGO constructor, now, like His Majesty from Majesty, you only distribute decrees to subjects.

Better to listen to what the residents say. You will be one step ahead of the challenges ahead.

The division into zones returned: residential, industrial, commercial. You have the right to plan the city however you like, but the in-game hints kindly hint that it is better to concentrate the factories in one place, because they pollute the air, reducing the value of the land.

Remember Stronghold, where the phrase "people leave us" was the quintessence of errors in the economy? In SimCity, something similar reflects the "happiness" parameter. If you provide residents with jobs, leisure and utilities, and radioactive waste is not unloaded near their houses, the population is happy and the city will begin to flourish. No - wait for the outflow of the population.

We will be reminded of the main rule of economics: in a prosperous city, income exceeds expenses. Convenient and visual statistics will not allow you to get confused in a complex system: with one click you will determine which buildings "eat" the most resources, and which ones bring profit. If you can't afford a project, suspend its work.

Dozens of maps with statistical data are an indispensable toolkit for a city manager.

So that residents do not pack their bags, provide them with the main things: water and electricity. Buy everything from neighbors or on the world market, or set up your own production? The first is more expensive, but it will solve the problem “here and now”; the arrangement of enterprises will take some time, and it will harm the environment - no one likes the neighborhood with a coal-fired power plant.

The key to prosperity in SimCity is not only a competent economy, but also successful diplomacy. You are not playing alone, there are places for other players in your region. There will be no struggle for territory - everyone is assigned their own "living space", and transactions are made on the global map.

Buying goods and services from a neighbor is cheaper than on the world market, which is worth using if your friend has some surplus. The game also welcomes the division of duties: your fire station will also serve the surrounding settlements, and your neighbor's garbage truck will help your ecology.

Circular and spiral roads appeared in SimCity for the first time. Beautiful, but impractical - you are tormented with the placement of outbuildings.

As soon as you solve the problem of sewage, the training mission will end - the city manager will kindly ask you to leave, suggesting that you finally look into the neighboring town. They won’t let you admire the surroundings enough - the Reapers attack the tourist paradise ... or something like that. On this joyful note, we are going to "roof" our own settlements.

Guarding the construction site

From now on, all your cities and achievements are stored on Electronic Arts servers. At the slightest disconnect, the game ends with an exit to the menu, and if you do not have the widest channel, get ready for delays in response time. You will not lose game progress by accidentally deleting your saves, but if the power is cut off in the server room or some problems occur, you will be left without access to the game.

If you plan to play with a friend, be sure to ask which server he settled on, otherwise it will turn out that you are building cities in parallel worlds. This also applies to the single game: after laying the foundation on the Europe East 1 cluster, you will not be able to build walls by selecting a different region. Achievements and challenges are also tied to your server.

The game does not allow you to make saves and roll back to them in case of disasters. A series of fires broke out - deal with it yourself.

Your cities, even within the same game zone, do not develop in real time, so the decision to constantly connect to the network seems doubly strange. Whether you play alone or in a crowd on a map with a dozen cities: each settlement develops at its own speed, and when you exit the game, its vital activity and production are suspended.

You can found a city on one of eight maps - each differs in scale, landscape and a set of specific conditions: in some area there are good deposits of oil or ore, in another - access to water and the railway. The terrain determines the direction of the city's development: on a site with a small amount of valuable minerals, it is no longer possible to become an oil magnate.

By the way: the game does not have a “God mode” with the ability to edit the landscape. If you want a mountain resort - put up with elevation changes. But natural disasters happen with enviable regularity - either an earthquake, or a hurricane, or a giant lizard will attack the city ...

The landscape is not very varied. They won't let us into Antarctica or the desert yet.

The game pushes us to create narrow-profile cities. No one will forbid combining the metallurgical industry with recreation areas and attractions in the form of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, but the return will be appropriate - tourists will not flood where the air is saturated with carbon monoxide, and the landscapes are spoiled by sewers.

The scale will not let you turn around either - compared to SimCity 4, the zones allocated for development are very compact, so it will not work to build multimillion-dollar megacities. But more attention is paid to details: as in Stronghold or Majesty, by clicking on a citizen or car, you will find out where they are going, whether they are satisfied with the current situation and what they lack for happiness.

From time to time, residents give us quests: build a landmark, cure a dozen sick people, or ensure population growth by providing more housing and jobs. Tasks are not limited in time and bring monetary rewards, but you should not agree to everything - some projects threaten the entire economy, others are fraught with negative consequences.

Low poly dragon woke up by garbage burning. Be prepared for this when building industrial empires.

By themselves, only private houses and enterprises are being built, and only in marked zones. You build transport stations, schools, fire stations, health services and other government institutions yourself and already for money, while the buildings appear instantly.

Additions were a notable innovation. Are the police failing to protect the streets? Instead of a new police station, build parking lots for additional cars or add cells to contain criminals. Not enough energy? Build a propeller for a wind farm. Outbuildings do not have to be located near the road, but some will not be able to function unless a service path is laid to them.

Small areas for development are compensated by the ability to take an entire state under your wing. Don't be discouraged if none of your friends have bought SimCity - you can run for mayor in neighboring cities as well, sharing the reins of power in several places.

Tram tracks in a newly built city are a luxury, but thanks to the financial help of our neighbors, we can afford it.

This little innovation makes a big difference game mechanics. It is no longer necessary to pollute your tourist resort - it is enough to turn another city into a radioactive dump and buy from yourself both resources in the form of electricity, fuel or water, as well as garbage collection and wastewater disposal services. It makes sense to save on infrastructure by sending fire engines, an ambulance and a police squad to the growing city.

An area that pollutes the water and the atmosphere will not become a paradise for vacationers and city nobles, but it will not be a burden for you and will bring millions if you make it the heart of the industry of the entire region. Even in the event of an economic collapse, such a city will continue to be useful - when you leave this microcosm, it will stop developing, earning and spending money, but will continue to supply resources and services for other settlements.

The apogee of prosperity is the construction of a large joint project, whether it be an international airport or a giant solar power plant. They are erected outside the city, in specially designated places, and their cost ranges from five hundred thousand to a million simoleons. The costs justify themselves, because the maintenance of the project costs a penny, but both workers and tourists are involved.

The construction of a large project is impossible without time and money. What will take more - depends on the servers.

If the transport system is established (ferries operate, to the external branch railway the station is attached), residents will be able to move between cities: go to a neighboring settlement for work and even for recreation. This is a huge plus for private enterprises: factories get new outlets, providing other entrepreneurs with raw materials.

It's interesting: to build a ferry crossing or a railway station, roads are not required, and they are located, respectively, near the water and the tracks. But one cannot do without a connection with the traffic flow - not only residents, but also water with energy “flow” along the roads.

The construction site is packed to capacity. Residents work, relax - everyone is happy. End?

And now a major project has been built, all cities are populated and consistently bring profit. Firefighters cope with the fire, doctors treat, police catch criminals - there is no need to intervene, mark the ground and build something. The mayor has done his job - it's time for the mayor to rest.

At this stage, all the inferiority of the game manifests itself. SimCity is a sandbox where there is no end goal. You will not find any campaign or scenarios here - occasionally Maxis is given a global condition, and the most nimble are rewarded with a memento achievement, but such events will not keep players for long.

The good, the bad, downloadable

SimCity has huge release potential additional content. Don't be surprised if the game follows in the footsteps of The Sims 3, where item sets sold at sky-high prices. Yes, and the game itself has room for improvement: it’s not for nothing that the release version did not include agriculture, religion, or the choice of the form of government.

The scale of the upcoming pipeline is hard to imagine, but six additions have already been released. Two of them are free: the building "berry park" is received by all buyers of the game directly in Origin, and the Nissan Leaf charging station is completely distributed to everyone. Of course, they don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but the horse is frankly icy and there is almost no sense in it.

Thanks to special image filters, we built a city in noir style.

Buyers of the Special Editions are in luck, as the Limited Edition includes the Heroes and Villains Pack, allowing you to recruit the superhero Maximan and the villain Doctor Wu to your side. Each of the characters lives in his lair and “pumps” during the game: Maximen helps the wounded (if he is paid, he is such a hero), and Wu organizes crimes, giving you part of the proceeds.

The more often you use the services of "supercharacters", the faster you will get access to their new abilities. Oddly enough, collaboration with Dr. Wu - so far the only way create a criminal empire, being known as a "thief in law".

Take the path of Evil? Minus to "happiness", but there will be no problems with money. Just like in life.

The owners of the Deluxe Edition, in addition to all of the above, got sets with English, German and French cities. Each package contains one attraction (Big Ben, Brandenburg Gate, Eiffel Tower) and a special building (double-decker bus terminal, German railway station, French police). Homes and businesses built near cultural monuments will also take on the identity of the nation.

Unfortunately, it will not work here to recreate a full-fledged Paris and feel its atmosphere. What kind of immersion are we talking about if the inhabitants of all cities speak English without exception? The game was translated into eighteen languages, but limited to text and subtitles. A rare case when the original voice acting loses in that it is the only one.

Conclusion

Impressions from SimCity vintage 2013 will depend directly on the fantasy and imagination of the player. If you are not embarrassed that the construction of a city on average takes only an hour of real time, and the arrangement itself is a rather monotonous process, especially when you learn how to properly manage finances, then this game will suit you and will certainly meet all your expectations.

The rest should either wait for very big discounts, or remember the classics in the form of SimCity 4. The new edition of the game was ruined by two miscalculations. The first is scale. Cities 2x2 kilometers? This is not serious and even stupid, especially when looking at a map of the region, when a small piece of land is dotted with skyscrapers, and next to it are bare meadows and forests.

The administration building was called the "city hall"? Protesters convey fiery greetings to localizers.

The second issue is replay value. The game captivates exactly for one evening, until you try different specializations of cities and determine the optimal course of development. No matter how hard you try to make each of your cities unique, from game to game you will be doing the same thing: taking care of water, energy, health and leisure of the population.

Verdict: a good city-building simulator with very poor tools. The game appears to be in early beta, and it's not due to technical glitches.

Rating: 7.3.

Between the lines. Why not make a full-fledged campaign in the game? Not for the sake of spectacular cutscenes or delightful dialogue, but in order to have an incentive to play differently. Each time, by modeling special situations in new scenery, you can achieve an effect called variety. But instead, we got a hastily sewn social part, and SimCity itself is far from the game of our dreams.

Vitaly Krasnovid aka Dezintegration

• SimCity (2013): performance testing
  Testing of nineteen video cards and seventy-two processors in three resolutions and two operating modes.


• at the conference site.

Legendary Series city-building simulators SimCity is back on computer screens and using all bonuses modern technologies like cooperative game over the Internet and extensive social functions. However, the restart can hardly be called successful: SimCity (2013) is full of non-obvious gameplay bugs, bugs, and technical issues like Error 37. But let's start in order.

There are no places, please try to connect to the server later

Electronic Arts assured that it was thoroughly prepared for the launch SimCity (2013). However, she learned nothing from Blizzard with her troubled launch. Diablo 3. For the first few days, players around the world were unable to connect to the game's servers without difficulty.

In order to somehow correct the situation, it was necessary to triple (!) the number of servers, although the load on the first game servers still hasn't dropped. All these problems arose because you can only interact with the city on the server where it was created. By joining another region, you will not be able to continue the previous game, you will have to start all over again.

Thus, starting a game on one server, you are unlikely to want to move to another, since you will have to rebuild the city, look for partners for co-op play, and also study why something does not work on the new server as it did on the previous one. This is where the crazy load on the first pair of servers comes from. If you have a lot of friends who play SimCity (2013), migrating to a free server will become even more problematic, since not all of them will want to explore a new region, when the old one is still being worked on and worked on.

Of course, over time, the number of players will be distributed equally among all the machines, but for now, the third and fourth servers are empty, so you will certainly encounter problems in a cooperative game.

Something in your city is not functioning as it should, leave the game, we need to fix the error

So, finally you managed to connect to the system and start the game. Do not rush to rejoice, there are many more unusual situations ahead of you. For example, the author of the review has built five cities, but only one of them is available for download at the moment. The download of any other city becomes simply endless, so the game has to be closed from the Task Manager. What happened to them, and whether they will be available at all, is unknown. At least, technical support, except for “we are working on fixing problems,” cannot say anything worthwhile.

SimCity has loaded and offers to start the game with a tutorial? Try it, but don't be surprised if for some reason you can't pass it, and you can't miss it either. Players have been complaining about a lot of learning issues, and I've run into a couple of annoying bugs, so the best thing to do in this situation is to quit and change servers.

After you complete the tutorial, you can start a new game. The developers offer ten regions to choose from, each of which has 14-16 free zones for building a city and 4-6 zones for large projects. In order to explore the region faster, you can immediately invite friends and, by helping each other, over time you can build a large project. Choose the territory of the future city carefully. Consider what resources the land under it is rich in and what problems will arise. Have you chosen? All right, take the territory and start playing.

What does it mean to be mayor?

The modern mayor has a lot of trouble. The police are failing to keep up with the rise in crime, the factory is short of workers to keep it busy, and the local school is overwhelmed with students. There are eternal traffic jams on the roads, while the sewerage system cannot cope with the load and sewage will soon flood the city.

All these problems can attack the player quite suddenly and completely take them by surprise. Funding adds fuel to the fire: maintaining services is quite expensive, so high level life will cost a pretty penny. However, most of the problems can be avoided if you plan the city map correctly from the very beginning. From the first time you are unlikely to succeed, but over time you will be able to quickly decide where to build residential areas, and where it would be better to organize production.

The developers have severely limited the player's imagination by narrowing the size of the map to a reasonable minimum. A third of the map is usually used for housing (green zone), a tenth for commercial buildings (blue zone) and factories (yellow zone), and the remaining space will be occupied by industrial complexes and mining plants. Or stadiums and exhibition centers. It already depends on what specialization you choose for development. If the card you chose earlier has deposits of coal, oil or ore, then you can profit from their processing. If the area attracts a lot of tourists, then you are better off building places that are visited, such as stadiums and cultural monuments. If you wish, you can always build a small airport or seaport, as well as add a casino and a brothel.

As a result, it turns out that the construction of the city will not take even eight hours. During this time, the city will not only receive the necessary specialization, but will also grow to the limits of the map, and 100-150 thousand people will live in it. As you understand, providing such a large number of people with communal conditions requires an adequate number of relevant services. This is where you will face the main problem: when the city is almost built up, it is very difficult to bring its condition to the ideal. You just don't have enough land for it, because you can't buy it in addition and thereby expand the size of the map. And to free up space, destroying already built buildings, is irrational.

Just for such players, the developers came up with mega projects like an international airport or an archaeological complex. It is practically impossible to master the construction of such a project by one city, but several cities will cope with this task with a bang. To do this, you will need to allocate certain resources. For example, send metal structures, TVs or people to build a project.

The bonuses from the implementation of such projects are much greater than the bonuses from the exchange of goods between cities. However, they will also require a lot of effort and time, so you will need to be well prepared before starting construction. Text chat will help coordinate the efforts of the players, although here you will need knowledge of English language. Most players use it for in-game communication. However, you can always gather Russian-speaking players by giving them invitations to join your private game.

So that you do not relax, various disasters will occur from time to time, which vary in strength and duration. It is clear that the damage from them will be different, sometimes even significant. A tornado can demolish a newly built stadium, and an ancient foot-and-mouth disease will trample several residential areas. Catastrophes are quite rare, but you will always feel their impact and no matter how much you like them, they bring a noticeable variety to the gameplay.

My city is on fire, and the firemen are doing nothing! What am I doing wrong?

Bugs are annoying and doubly annoying when you're expecting a AAA game like SimCity (2013) is. In the first days after the release, the players found so many problems that Electronic Arts had to offer all buyers of the new SimCity one at a time. free game as, so to speak, moral compensation. However, this did not improve the situation. I personally wrote twice to technical support, describing in detail what errors in gameplay have been discovered. Let's hope the developers fix them soon.

For example, very often players were faced with a situation where all the police or fire trucks went “engine” one after another to one call, instead of going to the alarm as needed.

It is also surprising that all services using the siren are stuck in traffic jams in the same way as regular transport. No one lets them through, and if you have a lot of traffic jams in your city, then firefighters simply will not have time to arrive on time. Against the backdrop of Maxis' statements that the behavior of each unit in the game will be calculated separately, this result looks very strange.

Controversial gameplay decisions include automatic construction and improvement of buildings in residential, commercial and industrial zones. Now these buildings themselves decide when to start upgrading themselves to the next level. Of course, the player helps them with their actions, improving the quality of life, but this deprives the player of the opportunity to control the situation. So, for example, you might have 6,000 unskilled workers living in private homes. As soon as you provide them with all the amenities, their dwellings will be upgraded to tenements, and the population will drop to 3000 people! At the same time, production buildings with each new level will need more workers, but their number, unfortunately, will always be less than necessary.

In general, the players have encountered a lot of errors, so if something does not work as it should or does not work the way you think, then try another server. It is quite possible that everything will work fine there. Often the game loses connection even with a free server, and sometimes the Origin client crashes, which leads to a complete restart of the game.

The joys of life

The developers kept their promise and the graphics in the game are quite decent. At the same time, the game works without performance drops on most older computers. The good news is that the developers have prepared an abundance of all kinds of buildings, so it's hard to see the same buildings in the city.

The quality of the cooperative game directly depends on who exactly you came across for the joint development of the region, but so far the audience is quite adequate and friendly. Even if you are a novice player, you will not be bullied for this, but they will even help you with good advice.

Once you get the hang of taking full advantage of the city's specialization, start trading on a large scale with other players, and build a mega project together, the game will open up to its best side. The thing is that you can simultaneously deal with several cities, using the funds of one city to build another. Four or five players in one region can be considered the best option - then there will be enough space for everyone and everyone will be able to develop what they want. For example, heavy industry in one city and tourism in the next. Or you can only do tourism, and your partner will improve the industry.

Conclusion

Over the past 10 years, city-building simulators have changed significantly. SimCity (2013) tries its best to keep up with fashion trends and not lose its unique features. In some ways, she succeeded in this - she well conveys the spirit of the first games in the series and requires the player to change the pace of the city's development, adapt to the situation and complete various mini-quests.

On the other hand, SimCity (2013) has lost a significant amount of seriousness and control, and has absorbed many simplifications. Same CitiesXL, a much more complex and deep game that requires the player to have a good understanding of the essence of the ongoing processes and the development strategy of the city. And the city itself is practically not limited in size there, and both 5 and 10 million people can live in it.

Thus, if you need to quickly build a city with minimal mental effort, then the new SimCity (2013) is your choice. If you like to keep everything under control and think deeply about the development of each individual quarter, try competitors, for example CitiesXL.

A new city-building sim came out, scary to think, ten years after the previous game. Sim City 4! And during this time, of course, much has changed. Despite the fact that the tasks of the player in the new part remain essentially the same as in 2003, SimCity 2013 requires detailed consideration. All the pros and cons new game you will learn from this review.

SimCity

Developer: Maxis Genre: Life Simulation Release Date: March 7, 2013 Official Website: simcity.com Similar games: SimCity 4, SimCity Societes

So in Sim City 2013 you are the mayor of a big city, in fact a metropolis. And this is a whole system, the development of which the authors of the game spent a lot of time and effort. The game constantly forces you to follow absolutely everything. In one place everything is in order, in another it is already chaos. They just fixed something at one end of the city, something happened at the opposite. And this is not to mention such an important thing as resources. In general, in the new SimCity resources are the source of all problems.

But not only! Of course, in 2013, such a game cannot do without the problems of environmental pollution. What's going on with the lack of water? It seems that the megacities of the near future will experience a shortage of everything that is possible. And it's even funny that in this game it is water that can cause so many inconveniences to players! This, it turns out, is much more dangerous than a sudden invasion of the living dead or a UFO that has appeared!

By the way, such jokes of developers are probably more pleasing than any other events in SimCity. But if we have seen all kinds of buildings, the whims of city residents, natural disasters in other life simulators, then the social component is what primarily distinguishes SimCity from competitors. An interesting feature of the novelty is that the metropolis is divided into districts, and the construction of several cities at once is much more interesting when playing with neighbors with whom the exchange of resources takes place, the choice of the most important buildings for the infrastructure, general solutions influencing the development of the city of dreams.

Of course, this implies communication between the players and indispensable conflicts, there are no identical opinions! Unfortunately, at this stage, this feature is implemented, to put it mildly, not so hot ... Firstly, a new SimCity, surprisingly, not such a large-scale "urban strategy", at least for 2013. The scale of development is somehow even smaller than in the original part. Maybe it just seems so because of the much prettier picture, against which you expect some unimaginable size of the metropolis, beyond the horizon! And it turns out in the end, well, a maximum of a town for a couple of hundred thousand inhabitants. This is not something that would be a minus of the game, but for sure many will experience some disappointment.

But on the other side, SimCity has become more difficult and rarely forgives mistakes. The choice of specialization is important here, that is, what you will focus on in your metropolis. Industry, gambling, tourism… A lot of things are expensive, but there won’t be enough resources for everything at once, so you need to decide from the very beginning. You need to keep track of the indigenous people, and tourists, and troublemakers - for a lot! And for those who have never dealt with Sim-like games, it can be very difficult.

This is an interesting simulation that takes many hours to enjoy. It’s not just that you sit down, set something up there, then do things, get dirty all environment, exhaust resources, leave the uneducated population, and then only suffer and try to enlist the support of neighbors. No, that won't work. It is necessary to study all possible ways of development, choose the most interesting for yourself and continue to track all the nuances. Then the city of dreams will not keep you waiting, and then it will be possible to support it for your own pleasure. But…

Secondly, at the moment with the servers at EA something incomprehensible is going on, and not everyone will be able to play. And all why? because gaming industry now it has chosen the trend of acquiring social opportunities. And it can ruin games that were great ten or twenty years ago in single player modes. Server overloads, but most importantly - a strong dependence of your progress and success in the game on other players (in this case, neighbors), in my opinion, all this is completely unhealthy.

About a full-fledged multiplayer that supports up to 16 people (!), For now, you can forget. Numerous complaints from players come for a reason, which means that the authors again did not master the innovations. And the worst thing is that even in single player Not everyone can enter! So for now, you can forget about leader boards, online competitions on the topic “but my town is better” or “let's strive together for the best metropolis in the world!”.

All in all, Sim City 2013- an excellent city-building simulator, but the online orientation spoils the impression in the same way as it was in 2012 with Diablo 3. Those who adapt to this system are lucky, I recommend everyone else not to waste precious time and try to enjoy what is possible without the help of other players.

P.S. I hate Origin, and after such outrages with the new SimCity I would like to send the developers at all, wishing to forever abandon the online tricks in such initially wonderful games.

The most relevant player complaints can be viewed.

SimCity trailer:

Pros Great metropolis simulation Multiple specializations to choose from Cool natural disasters Lots of options when playing with friends Decent graphics and sound Cons Disadvantages Problem with servers Origin system basically Small map scale

Create your own city and become the absolute master in it. It is these opportunities that you will have if you decide to download Simcity with a game in Russian. In front of you is the most new part in the eponymous game series of city-building simulators. The newest, which means you will have new opportunities. The simulator has become much more colorful and spectacular, and the controls, on the contrary, have become simpler. At your disposal will be a piece of land on which you will lay the first buildings and houses.

Building a city is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. After all, you have to deal with not only the construction of houses. It is also necessary to develop infrastructure: build roads, water pipes and sewerage systems, take care of the life and leisure of the population, and much more. In general, Maxis gives you the opportunity to make sure that the position of mayor of the city is not so simple and easy. Downloading Simcity full Russian version on PC is as easy as shelling pears. Click a couple of times with the mouse button and in a matter of minutes one of the most famous city-building simulators on your computer or laptop.

Screenshots of SimCity 2014