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SimCity Societies mini-review |
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Man, SimCity Societies is pretty sweet. I wish I had illegally downloaded it earlier.
They simplified the SimCity mechanics by eliminating power lines, water pipes, subways, trash, taxes, and a whole hoard of other stuff that I previously thought I loved to jumble.
Now, if something produces electricity, any building anywhere can use that electricity. Instead of taxing people, you earn money for every day a working citizen goes to work.
The basic mechanics is as follows: You build a house and people move in, then you build a workplace for them and they go to work. Then you build places for them to have fun, because unhappy citizens don't work. It all seems very simple (and it is), but they added something completely new that mixes things up.
There are a number of different... um... cultural energies? I don't know what to call them, but they represent base elements of the various societies you can cultivate; Creativity, Authority, Knowledge, Prosperity, Productivity, etc. and every single building in the game either produces or consumes these points.
So, building a home that'll bring in new workers may cost two Creativity points. If there aren't enough points, the house will remain empty. So you have to build something else to cover those points. Often, you can find a workplace or venue that covers the cost of the houses for it's workers, or you could drop money on various decorations that increase the various Culture points.
It has a very card-game feel to it, with the buildings costing/producing mana Culture and all working together. Different buildings can be even more effective depending on what's near them. Most buildings are of a particular type and you can do things like build a Graveyard to reduce the cost of Creepy type buildings (Haunted Houses for your Zombie sims and Creepy Barns for them to work in.)
Oh, yeah, there's a lot of emphasis on individual sims too. Different buildings can turn sims into special sims, like Zombies, Rock Stars, Holy Men, etcetera. My town is actually being pretty much over-run by mimes at the moment. :f
Anyway, with such a simplified system, you'd think one would just build the same three buildings that cover Sims' needs and do ad-nauseum, which you certainly could do, but Maxis urges the player to experiment very well. As your city expands, you enevtiably produce more and more mana points Culture, and as it increases you unlock different buildings to use. Some are more effective, and some force you to use different Cultures than your current main focus.
And if simply having new toys to play with wasn't enough incentive to play around, they created an Achievement system to further goad the player. When your city hits certain requirements (large population with almost no unhappy workers and ridiculous amounts of Culture being produced, for example) you get an Achievement. Along with the achievement, you unlock a special, ultra-cool building that you can build only once, and usually has some unique properties. This is basically the same as the Landmark buildings from SimCity and the Gifts you received when reaching population goals. But now you receive them for more varied circumstances, and it's all very open. You know exactly what you have to do in order to get these buildings.
Overall, it plays very well. Fast-paced and very absorbing. The game's balanced so well, that I've never even come across a situation where I have to sit and let my city run on auto-pilot for a few hours just to work up necessary funds.
I highly recommend it.
CrashMD · Tue Mar 04, 2008 @ 03:08pm · 1 Comments |
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