User Reviews (1 - 11 of 80)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Buyer Beware: Game Still Full of Bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 48 / 60
Date: November 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

As an avid SimCity fan, I am very disappointed to report that EA Games, who used a different company than the one which produced the SimCity games, has apparently rushed this game to the shelves for the holidays before it is ready.

Virtually no technical support yet exists, and more users every day are reporting installation and game crash problems. In addition, the true list of system requirements are not provided on the outside of the box - this game is not compatable with many of the most popular video cards, including numerous versions of NVIDEA gaming cards. This means that tens of thousands of PC users can NOT run this game.

I can't recommend strongly enough that buyers wait for several months to purchase this game to see if EA will be issuing patches to fix these numerous problems. Whatever you do, check the [...] website before you purchase - unless you have a gaming PC that is less than a year old, there is a very good chance that your PC will not meet the "true" systems requirements.

move along folks, nothing to see here..

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 37 / 45
Date: November 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

i'm not a veteran sim city fan at all, but this game looked like an interesting take on the franchise - i thought you'd be able to create interesting societies and see how people act within them. wow, am i disappointed. and it's not just me - all the users of gamespot are giving this 1-star reviews too.

there's just nothing here. there are social "energies" like authority and creativity, and you create buildings based on which energies they create or use. it sounds fun - it is not. i don't feel connection at all to the citizens, and the bad camera doesn't help that at all. also the graphics suck - things should be bright and easy to see from a good angle. instead, they're at a bad angle, you can't zoom in very close and nighttime keeps coming making it hard to see. what the hell?

the user interface is simply a mess. there are tons of buildings grouped together alphabetically instead of by a meaningful category system. this means if you want to build any building, you have to scroll through and find the one you want alphabetically. that sucks. there are filters for creativity, authority etc. for buildings but they display the ones that USE and the ones that CREATE the energy all together. not good. i'm afraid the bottom line is, this game is just not good or fun. if you're an old sim city fan, or even if you're not like me, i'm afraid you are going to be disappointed.

Horribly Unstable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 28 / 33
Date: November 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game is NOT SimCity. It has little depth, almost no problem solving, and nothing that can't be fixed by spending money and replacing buildings. Money just rolls in once your city reaches critical mass, and that's not hard to do either. If you want a challenge in this game, you'll have to create it yourself by deliberately throwing in crime, pollution, and situations that provoke sims in to going 'rogue'.

But the graphics are awesome. The city's roads and buildings take on the character of certain archetypes (cyberpunk, authoritarian, romantic, fun, contemplative, etc) as you push certain societal energies. This makes playing the game and watching the evolution of your city a lot of fun.

However, the energies themselves affect only buildings. Sims are sims in this game and never act any different depending on what you do. They get happy and unhappy just the same. For all it's talk about creating your own society, this game doesn't seem to realize that the society is the people. Since none of what you do affects the people much at all the game comes across as rather hollow and superficial.

If you'd like to create a city from a simple artistic point of view, this game is for you. You've got total control over which building goes where. Street placement is limited to 90 degree angles though and there's only 2 kinds of streets (the paved one does change according to what energies your city uses, and these different types have already been unlocked by at least one mod). If you are looking to indulge your creativity in building a beautiful city with an interesting layout, this game will let you do just that.

But wait for another patch. This thing crashes frequently. I can get up to 2hrs of playtime before it crashes depending on how large my city is and how much I do. Often it crashes after 30 min on small to medium cities. I haven't gotten anywhere close to filling up the map. The EA SCS boards are filled with people who have similar, if not worse problems. (There is an autosave feature. I have it set to save every 5 min. But really, who wants to play a game that continually crashes?)

SCS is a game that's more geared towards the casual gaming market. That's ok (except for the hardcore SimCity4 fans who were looking for an update on a classic). I could get into SCS and lose myself for several hours if it was stable and would run for several hours reliably. I'd give it a 3/5 on the fun scale. But I have to take off 2 stars for instability. I have Vista 64 and my computer specs far exceed the minimum. There's no excuse, in my opinion, for releasing a game that obviously wasn't beta tested enough. I have to assume EA was trying to cash in on the Christmas buying season since they well knew they weren't going to get many SimCity fans sold on SCS.

Worst SimCity game ever.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 28
Date: November 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If only I could give zero or negative stars, I would have. I've owned pretty much every SimCity game ever made, and this one is by far the worst. I don't know what they were thinking letting someone other than Maxis make this. I suggest you save your money and wait for Maxis to come out with another one of their own.

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.

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.

Boring, even for kids

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 17
Date: November 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

My six kids and I love the Sim City games, and we were excited about this one, but out of the seven of us, no one liked it. My sons complained that it was boring and didn't have interesting ways to destroy cities, and my daughters felt the gameplay was loose and pointless. I didn't like it either, it crashes often and it isn't nearly as complex and interesting as the regular Sim City games. We're uninstalling, it's not worth the disk space it's hogging.

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.

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!

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next 

Actions