****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I was extremely excited for SimCity 5. I was watching the gameplay footage upon release and I told myself that I have to get this. I haven't played SimCity since the SNES version and SimCity 5 peaked my interest again into the series. When I found out you have to always be online to play this game due to EAs draconian DRM measures, I decided against it because it makes no sense to always having to be online to play a single player game. So therefore I downloaded SimCity 4 instead, and now I am addicted.I didn't have any issues this far with the monitor settings, it automatically adjusted to the optium setting. As for the download, it was fairly quick and the installation took a mere 5 minutes. Once I booted the game up I did the tutorials so I could get familiar with the game. While the tutorials are somewhat helpful when it comes to placing schools, and other buildings, it never mentioned neighboring cities. When I loaded up my first region my industry demand was really high and I was creating a lot of pollution in my city really early in the game. Then I realized that you can connect neighboring cities and put all the industry in there, therefore reducing pollution at where your sims live. But once you get that going and start building your city slowly but surely you will have traffic jams, demand for fire stations, and start building schools. There a lot of details that you have to watch out for that a casual gamer may feel overwhelmed at first, but if you are patient, you will naturally learn how to expand your city as it grows.Gameplay 4/5The presentation of this game felt clunky at times. I didn't know what all the icons stood for and it was hard for me to find out where to micromanage your funds at first. Once again the tutorials were lacking a tutorial of how to use the the interface. I would highly recommend watching a few youtube videos of people playing this game before you go into it. Even after 10 hours into the game, I still find certain interfaces that I had not idea about that could of been really beneficial when I started building my region.Presentation 3/5A lot of people are stating they are having issues with their monitor settings, especially with widescreen monitors. I have not yet experienced any issues and the game automatically optimized all my graphic settings to high. The graphics still holds up even though this is a 10 year old game. They aren't the best but they are good and fun to look at. Graphics do tend to get choppy from time to time in a heavily dense area, but they smooth out fairly quickly. If you bought a computer within the last 5 years, I think you should be fine in the graphics department.Graphics: 4/5Overall: I think this game is great and it is very addictive. Instead of building a city, you are building a region with connecting cities. There are no limits to creativity with this game. It is sad to see EA and Maxis going the always online DRM route because SimCity 5 looks more sharper and the gameplay looks great, but I refuse to pay for $60 to just rent a game. Not to mention I heard there are a lot of micro-transactions within the game itself. This game, you don't have to be connected, their are a ton of community mods out there and I will be trying them out soon, and after 10 years of this games release, it is still supported by a great community of gamers. If you are looking for a great city building game, look no farther than to SimCity 4!
