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I can't even play the game!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: December 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As an avid Sim City and Sims2 fan, I was really anticipating the new SimCity Societies. Unfortunately, I CAN'T EVEN PLAY THE GAME!!

This game is so full of bugs, it won't play on either my laptop or my desktop, even after installing the patch. My advice is to wait until the bugs are worked out before buying the game.

Not a Sim City Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 19
Date: November 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is a not in the tradition of sim city. I have played all previous versions of simcity. It is a cartoon type game for children not a city simulation. I hope a real sim city 5 game is released.

not worth the bucks

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: December 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Well, the graphics for the buildings were fun and a number of micro-management aspects of previous simcity games were simplified.

However, you can finish a scenario in less than a day and the replayability is limited to choosing different societal themes to see how the cities evolve. I suppose you could set the difficulty level to hard which makes it more challenging to keep sims happy, but I'm not sure that would really raise the fun level.

In particular, by removing the maintenance cost of buildings, any need for long-term stratgic thinking was completely removed (if you have money there's basically no reason not to spend it as it is pretty much a one-time investment to purchase something. The only strategy aspect is determining if you have the money to purchase any necessary balancing items for the building you want to buy.)

Buildings don't degenerate over time (or if they do it is so slow as to not have been an issue for me) so there's no surprises in store requiring sudden cash to rebuild a destroyed power plant. Occasional fires required paying attention to, but didn't seem terribly destructive or costly. Crime management was a bit of a interesting bone thrown out, but it seemed relatively easy to control and didn't seemt o cause too many problems even if crime became high.

So, the only real strategy is ensuring you can spend enough money to put in venues to keep the residents happy, as well as some ultimately very annoying micromanagement to go in to each building that has available actions in order to trigger the action and figure out what other buildings you want the action to apply to. Clever idea, but impractical in a large city (and not really needed anymore at that time)

If you want to spend the time poking at each individual sim you can find out a lot about them, but you don't get any kind of interaction like in the Sims either. A bit more than in SimCity 4 which let you import sim families.

All in all, while I enjoyed playing it for 2 days and might try playing again with the small town/old-fashioned town models (which I think in many regards are the hardest because you have to avoid many of the structures that make things easy), it is a lot of money for only a few hours of play.

Even on a new, relatively good machine (core 2 duo, 2 GB RAM, decent video card, 10k RPM HD), I found the performance with a large city to be bad and if I were to spend much time with large cities I'd have to crank down some of the graphics details to make it faster. Small towns and the beginning part of the game had pretty good performance.

Great game - Very different from the rest of the series, but still great

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 17 / 26
Date: November 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If you're looking for an overly convoluted, heavy difficulty city-building game, look elsewhere. If you're looking to build a fantastic looking, full-of-life city that you can have a lot of fun playing around in without oppressive micromanagement weighing you down the whole way, this is your game. The game oozes charm and personality, and there are tons of buildings and city archetypes to choose from. Watching the different types of Sims live out their lives in the city you've created is a real treat-- and as per usual for the Sims games, you can make them as happy or miserable as you want.

Most of the negative reviews as of late seem to come from embittered SimCity fans who were expecting a direct sequel to SimCity 4. Were the game not titled SimCity, I guarantee the response would have been a lot more positive. Personally, I think it's a game anyone should be able to get something out of (for the more hardcore gamers, mods have already been released to make the game a more challenging experience). Highly recommended.

Not bad...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: January 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I enjoyed playing SC Societies much more than SC 4. I found dealing with zoning and budgets to be tedious and boring. I disliked the fact that I had no real say regarding the demographics of my cities. Societies is for players, like myself, who are more interested in the sociopolitical dynamics and personality of the city rather than the economics. I don't think one game is better than the other...I am just glad that there was a version created for those of us who were looking for something else in the game. The only real negative is that there are no real goals other than gaining trophies, but other than that my playing experience has been very pleasant.

SELLOUTS, OVERPRICED, 5 YR OLDS FUN, NOT SIM CITY

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 25
Date: November 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

R.I.P. :( what happened to sim city???? this is the BIGGEST sell-out ever for capital! This is the version that should have been made along with the release of SIM3k. This is tremendously disappointing, to all the dedicated lovers of sim city, i do apologize for the bush administration as well as the greedy life-ers & producer of this game (like nintendo). However CITY LIFE (by Monte Cristo [http://www.montecristogames.com/city-life/en/index.php]) is a better game and the original idea that SIM CITY SOCIETIES COPIED, hoping to make bank with the name, selling to unsuspecting sim enthusiasts now /fathers and mothers hoping to please their 5 year olds for christmas. CITY LIFE is the better choice, trust me. can't zoom out to see my city when placing something :X frustrating. no highways or options for different roads, for f**ks sake can't even make a road on an angle. This is sad. :'( Thanx for sharing this, but it sucks and thank god energy for creating torrents, so we don't have to be ripped-off.) I really wish this company to fall through and teach-em a lesson.

Crashes after a few minutes of play.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: December 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Game crashes all the time. You get about 10 minutes then it will lock up or crash to the desktop. Looking in the forums over at EA this isn't an isolated problem. The patch that is out didn't help. Avoid this title until they fix the problems.

Steaming Pile of Monkey Crap !

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: January 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

If it's not obvious by the title, i am not at all happy with Societies. The game flat out doesn't work, it's defective. It's like buying a broken toaster and trying to toast with it. As you will no doubt read in forms and reviews here, if you're one of the probably 2% of gamers that actually are able to get the game to start without a runtime error, the frame rates are aweful, the game lags out and crashes (so i've read.... on five computer's i've tried to run this game on, i can't even get it to start! ). My gaming rigs aren't slouches either, the computers run other recent games like Team Fortress 2 and Gears of War PC just fine but SimCIty Societies flat out doesn't even start up.

I thought SimCity DS was bad, at least that worked! It's become clear to me that EA has butchered the game and SimCity is never going to get any better than SC 3000. It's time to move on I guess and forget what a great game this franchise used to be under Maxis control.

This will be the last EA game i buy as well. I had boycotted them already for a year on Xbox 360 after the other steaming piles of crap they'd released for that console. I had hoped their quality had improved over the year but it hasn't. It's no wonder Activision has taken EA's number one publisher spot. EA needs to be ripped apart and rebuilt, get some people in there that actually know how to make games that work and oh ya.... an QA lab would be a worthwhile investment as well.

DON'T BUY THIS GAME.... PERIOD!

Not the SimCity I know

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: December 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

In a nutshell, this is not the SimCity I know or expected to see. I've played SimCity games from the very start, and what has made each one good in its own right is the gameplay. The control over all aspects of the city you manage is part of the appeal. SimCity Societies appears to sacrifice gameplay for graphics. I have played SimCity IV for hours on end. I played SimCity Societies for about 30 minutes and it's stayed in the box ever since.

It's a beautiful game, but it feels like nothing is happening. I don't care about the various energies that seem to be based on nothing real. What I care about is power, police, fire, the various services that make up the city. These aspects are all but absent.

With all due respect, while the word "Societies" might have been a tip off that things had changed, calling this "SimCity" is inaccurate and misleading. I think people who didn't buy this game expecting SimCity may appreciate it. It's unlikely that I ever will. It's just not my kind of game.

Pathetic

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: December 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is just pathetic. After 6 hours of play i realize there's no point. It's too easy to make money and no balance to the game. I bought it and I'm just disappointed. Save your money.

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