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Nintendo: DS Reviews

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood ^DS

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Review

SimCity Creator

85%

Format Nintendo Wii

Developer EA

Publisher EA

Genre Sim / Strategy

30-Sep-2008 Is the classic city-builder worthy of World Heritage status?

8 Comments

SimCity should come with a health warning. There are few other games that are quite so good at causing acute sleep-deprivation. Once you've given birth to your first city, it's near impossible to tear your eyes away from all those charts, graphs and spreadsheets. Despite the fact that you spend extended periods of time essentially doing nothing at all, it can be an utterly life-ruining experience once it gets its claws into you, believe us.

The problem is though, it's all essentially completely pointless. Bit by bit, you'll craft a huge, map-filling metropolis and then... well, exactly; what then? There's no pay-off, no flash of light, no resolution - just a nice, sprawling city to gaze at in perpetuity.
So, SimCity Creator's challenge is to offer the player motivation enough to keep on going. The original DS incarnation, released last year, was a decent stab at bringing Will Wright's decades-old classic to the handheld but it fell down due to its lack of longevity. You could only have one city on the go at a time and there was very little reason to keep on playing once you'd filled the play area.

Does it succeed? Almost. The core gameplay is largely unchanged from the last game: build commercial, residential and industrial zones, along with police stations, jails, parks, stadiums, schools, airports and a transport network to create a perfectly balanced metropolitan area. You'll be juggling your balance sheets and studying maps and charts to make sure you attract as many settlers as possible. Occasionally Mother Nature will trouble you with a hurricane or earthquake, just to keep you on your toes.

The Eternal City
To its credit though, Creator does a reasonable job of adding a little more structure to proceedings this time around, thanks to its main Challenge mode. You'll start off in the Stone Age tasked with building a simple settlement close to food sources and then gradually expand your town through time, taking in medieval China, Renaissance Italy, industrial Europe and then the modern age.
You'll only move on to a different period once you've met a set goal - whether that be increasing your population to a certain level or achieving a 100% approval rating. As you progress, you'll unlock new buildings and services, which is a neat way of both introducing the increasingly complex gameplay elements and keeping things fresh at the same time.

Traditionalists, panic not though. Should you want the old-fashioned SimCity back, a standard freeplay mode is included as well, allowing you to pick a time period and get building without the main narrative thread to distract you.
The only other significant changes from the last game are cosmetic. The various advisers and visitors who come to your office now adopt a cutesier MySims-esque look. The menus have been streamlined slightly, the laborious tutorial has been done away with and there are a few new buildings to get to grips with, mainly concerning a timely new eco-friendly angle. In the modern age section of the game, there is a big focus on creating a green city, so you'll be building recycling plants, desalination centres, wind farms and greenhouses.

While the core gameplay is basically exactly the same and visually its nearly identical to its predecessor, the gameplay tweaks make this a more satisfying package. If you bought the original, the new elements probably aren't enough to warrant a purchase. However, if you're new to the franchise and thinking about dipping your toe into the painfully addictive world of city building then SimCity Creator comes highly recommended.

Tom East