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If you liked the previous releases....stay away from this one

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I have to agree with the previous posters. I had read about this fifth iteration of the game and was not at all happy with what I was reading. But of an afternoon, I found myself at Target, saw that it cost $[...] (badder sign, I thought) and said, what the heck.
The heck indeed.
I had not heard about all the bugginess - so I assumed it was a fault of the brand spanking new Dell mobile workstation that had been delivered. The machine has monstrous specs for a laptop, is all I will say, runs everything Adobe simultaneously and begs for more. SCS ground the system to a complete halt.
I managed to get through the tutorial, and what can I say: even in free play, the fun of the game for me was...building things. Making the city grow. Balancing its capitalist imperatives with my own aesthetic of urban design. Or in SC4, the regional option was great to juxtapose different cities with 'bedroom communities', industrial wastelands, etc. And transit - again, SC4 allowed regional transport systems, and if you played well, it worked.
I could care less about promoting societal values. It seems like some sort of awfully academic attempt to remake the SC franchise in some Gen-Y friendly way, it's awfully post-modern. If you think "the Sims" games are fun, you'll probably like this one. Me, coudn't abide it.

Not so bad

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Being a real Sims fan for more than 6 years, I hestitated before buying this version. I read a lot of the reviews about how terrible the game is since it's not like the original, how there are system and graphics problems, etc. Well I finally bought it last week and much to my surprise I like it. It is differnet from the other SimCities but that's what makes it fun. I'm running this game on 3GB RAM, 320 GB HD and NVIDIA's 8400M graphics card. The game is a monster space eater so your computer must be up to date. I also downloaded patch 4 from EA games and have played the game for several hours and had no problems. The only downside is that you shouldn't run your virus or spyware while playing and this is a problem if you still want to be online. Otherwise, enjoy it.

Patch #5 and still not working correctly

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: June 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

There's not much I can add to what has already been said about this game. It is very easy to play and looks good, but other than that I can't recommend it. Not to mention the fact that we are now up to patch #5 and it STILL doesn't work right. I have a brand new, fully loaded for gaming computer. In the past I could play for about an hour, then it would crash to the desktop. With the latest patch I get about 30 minutes and the game freezes for no apparent reason. It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing. In fact, it has frozen when I wasn't even touching the mouse. At least before it crashed to the desktop, but with the freezing it is a little more complicated to get out of it without restarting the computer, but it can be done through the Task Manager.

Overall, I personally feel that this game is a total ripoff. They keep trying to add new features with each patch to make it more fun, but I see little or no improvement in the playbility even if it didn't crash/freeze constantly. Pass this one up.

So-So Effort, but not a true Sim City

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: June 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game is probably good for people coming from The Sims line of games who want to try out Sim City for the first time. However, for someone like me that has played the Sim City series from the beginning, it is a huge letdown. If Maxis were still designing the game, they would never have let it fall so far. The game is semi-entertaining for the first 2 or 3 times you play it, but after that it will get very dusty on the shelf.
Technical issues / complaints:
RESOURCE HOG! If your machine has less RAM than a server, and/or a graphics card that is more than a week old, it is probably too weak to really handle this game.
Play DVD. Even with the registration code, you still need to have the DVD in the drive to play the game. This is beyond annoying if you're taking it along on your laptop as a little downtime diversion.
Graphics can get jumpy, and can also develop lines going across the screen.
Even with the latest update, the game still likes to blow up every so often. So, save your city often!

Great game potential, but gotta work some of the hefty game requirements...wishing now for a Mac version

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: December 31, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought SimCity Societies for my wife as she loves the SimCity genre. This is totally different from the Classic SimCity style game, yes you still build a city and control aspects of it, but in this game you get more control over how your Sims live and interact. Gone is the lengthy zoning requirements that you had in other SimCity versions. Instead you get to place every building. You are regulated by many factors now, having to figure out if a structure provides enough happiness or entertainment value etc. Its somewhat intimidating to me who last played SimCity 2000 and SimCity 4 Deluxe. This game has some HEFTY video and system requirements. My wife's PC has plenty of RAM (4GB) and a great video card (Radeon X1650 w/ 512MB) and the game still chunks along at times until you go into the Video settings and adjust for lower values. You really should want to have a Dual Core processor to play this at anything above default values. The 3D is freaking awesome. Sometimes its just cool to spin the camera around and snap different pics of the city you made. One thing we love is you can create various types of cities from a Fun theme to a Capitalist theme to an Authoritative Dictatorship theme. And if you screw up or get tired... you let loose Armageddon. Although, the Destructive Forces in my opinion are way too limiting... Killer Storm, Meteors, Fires, Earthquake. I yearn for the UFO Alien Attack, or Giant Lizard from other SimCity games. Perhaps there will be addons. The game is hard to get into... You really NEED the Game Guide. Its not too expensive. I got it for my wife at the same time as the game. The Guide helps so much with some of the cryptic icons and other weirdness. When going to the SimCity Society Forums I get the feel that a lot of people are Disappointed with the Game. There is a Patch out now which can fix some of the crud. As of right now, There is only a Windows Version. Which is very sad... Mac Users have to Use BootCamp or similar to run Windows XP/Vista on their Intel Macs. Even then there are errors that pop up. The game makers REALLY need to Port this game 100% to the Mac platform. Anyone with a new Mac would have enough specs to run the game. Oh well. My wife and I gotta share for now. Until I buy my own copy. :)

Not SimCity 5

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

If you are looking to a follow-up to SimCity 4, this is not it. The similarities between SC4 and SimCity Societies ends with the fact that you are building a city.

This game is more focused on the energy of the society than it is with traditional SimCity style city-building. It is a breath of fresh air and is just as addictive as the older versions if approached with an open mind. Overall, the gameplay is pretty interesting and it is fun to try to build different styles of cities.

The reason I will only give this game 3 stars is the technical difficulties that come with it. The installer is abnormally slow in comparison to any other game installer I have ever seen. I tried to use the update patch from EA, but it keeps giving me an error saying that I need to uninstall and reinstall the game (which I have done, to no avail). Even with my new-ish graphics card (nVidia GeForce 8500 GT), Intel Core 2 Quad processor and 2GB RAM on WinXP, I had to set most of the graphics settings to low and reduce the resolution to 1440x900 for the game to be responsive enough to be playable.

Overall, I'm excited about the potential of this game, just disappointed in the execution of the development by EA and Tilted Mill.

Don't Buy This Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: June 15, 2008
Author: Amazon User

You know, I loved all of the Simcity games and didn't hesitate when I saw this sitting on the shelf. I won't bore you with a lengthy description, just read the lengthy review of the guy before me - I agree with everything he said exactly spot on. I'll add a bit though, if you are like me, and absolutely annoyed with our media and government hammering us with that "Global Warming" hoax you won't be disappointed in this game. As soon as I saw that my city (which functioned completely on hydrogen power) was causing natural disasters in other parts of the world I turned it off. The final insult from EA on this flaming-turd of a game? It won't uninstall. Thanks EA, I'll spend the next three hours of my Sunday afternoon trying to get your propaganda filled, virus-like software cleansed from my system. Too bad EA doesn't sell digital disinfectant.

disappointing step down from previous games

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

What was perhaps the most disappointing thing in a long list of disappointments about this game was that it did not build off of previous SimCity versions. It threw out everything good and started from scratch, and this SimCity bears no resemblance to the other games I loved. Perhaps most egregiously, it imparts no real wisdom as to the cause-and-effect nature of the ecological and societal impacts of the buildings you place. All in all, not at all fun, doesn't really make any sense at all! And I had such high hopes.

Great Potential...Ultimate Letdown

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: February 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game has the potential to be something big, however the system crashes doesn't do the game any justice. I have a Quad processor with a GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 over clocked video card with 3 gigs of memory to boot and the game still experiences constant crashes. I've downloaded the patches to no avail. It was quite entertaining for a while but eventually transitioned to pure frustration. I hope the next game is more game user friendly than this one.

Fun game, but too many crashes

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: April 06, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Having been a SimCity player since the beginning, I enjoyed playing the game, and don't miss some of the chores of SimCity, such as routing your water pipes or subway tubes. I enjoy the new concepts with venues and other buildings developing authority, spirituality, etc. The graphics look good. I wish I could find my rogue sims more easily, and determine why they are unhappy.

My biggest complaint though, is not the game design, it's the system crashes. I can only play for about 30-40 minutes at a time before the screen freezes, I need to hit ctrl-alt-del and end the game and reboot it. I have 3 GB of memory and an NVIDIA 8500 graphics card, so there should not be a problem like this, unless there is some kind of a memory leak or graphics issue in the game itself. I don't have problems like this with any other games or other programs. A good patch might take care of this, but I have the latest.

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