SimCity 4

The Good
Graphics are great. There are some errors and glitches, but when everything works, the game is beautiful. The details are amazing! Although we cannot yet walk in the streets of the city in person, we are almost there.

It turns out that to make a city live and breathe was not that difficult. Extremely varied and detailed buildings, coupled with realistic cars and pedestrians, add authenticity to the city as nothing else would. With zoom on the max level, you can spend hours watching the life of your favourite city part and the feelings you will have towards something like finally emerging downtown business district are nothing short of paternal. :)

Your city will feel real. As it develops gradually, your imagination can run wild and create countless stories about the inhabitants. :))) There is a special feature of the game that will help you with this. You can settle up to five Sims anywhere in the city - importing them from your copy of the Sims (if you have it) or selecting them from a small number of pre-set personalities.

These Sims will start living their simulated lives, doing their career in any of the businesses in your city, studying in colleges and universities, moving to another house when the old one is demolished or when a Sim can afford a more expensive place to live. You will periodically hear small stories from them that will entertain you when you have a moment free from managing the city.

The Bad
It slows to a crawl, when the city grows to more than 20000 people. Scrolling will be jerky, the game will swap to the HDD more, etc. Unfortunately, this will happen even on the best systems.

Bugs. Enough said.

The messages can become a bit repetitive. Reading once about the squirrels is fun, reading the same message ten times is not. Fortunately, only the most urgent messages in the game are popped-up - the rest can be grouped, filtered and ignored or viewed when you want to.

The Bottom Line
An excellent update to the series.