User Reviews (71 - 81 of 210)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

This game is pretty good!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: October 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I think this is the best game of the series so far. Sim City 4 is a pretty good game, the thing you do in this game is you creating a big city (metropolis) and just building apartments, bus stopes, aiports, bridges, another words you are a mayor who controlls the whole city, and you trying to breath the life into it, you trying to build people everything you need for life, to go to work, to have water, to build everything they need. In this game you have to pay loans, and the more people and population you have the more income you get. You can lower your expanses or for example raise the taxes and the population (people) will go down and people will start going and moving away from your city. This game you can build a lot of things fro your city, you can build houses, or hi-apartments, or even Empire State Building or even Hollywood letters located in California. But the thing I dont like about this game, that you can see where your city ends, when you minimize your city you can see like a big square. Thats the only thing I dont like about this game. And rememebr if you will buy it, it will be really hard for you, because it is a hard game. And never use cheats for this game because, if you will do it once your money that you bought the game for will just go away, and the game will not be fun for you anymore! I hope this review helped you!

Fun, then crash, then wait, then fun, then crash, then ....

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: March 26, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've loved every simcity game since the first and, in theory, I love this one as well. The graphics are rich and vibrant and the level of complexity is awesome. Now for the down sides....

The game crashes mind numbingly awesome. My machine screams with ever game I've played, including massive strategy games, but playing this you would think my P4 was a comedore 64. The game just keeps going down. As for playability, it seems excellent, if only the game stayed up long enough to really enjoy a full game.

This really needed a few more months of Beta.

I would wait!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: January 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Like everyone else, I ran out and bought the game. I was unable to play it on my pc due to video card requirements. BE FORWARNED!
The game is a systems hog. I liked the graphics, but, it is still not complete. It lacks many of the features that SC3U had.
The game takes forever to get moving, you have no option if you want a big city or a small town.
I foresee several upgrades just like the Sims for this game.
Although, you have control and budget features like never before, you don't have the creative aspect to build the city of your dreams. You are forced to play the game as it was meant to! Now, after playing SC2000,SC3000 and SC3U, I clearly know how to play the game. At this point, I just want to be creative and build a metropolis. Don't get me wrong, it is an impressive game, but, I think it's incomplete and all the buzz around it don't quite measure up to it.

The Best Yet

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: March 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First, a nod to the truth that you'd better have a good computer on which to play this game if you intend to enjoy it. I'm running a pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, with 256MB RAM, etc., with an NVIDA GForce4, etc., and have had pretty good game play, though the play can get choppy with a larger city.

If you don't have a system that meet the recommended requirements, you won't be able to enjoy this game.

That said, this has to be the best version of SimCity thus far, and I say that haveing played every version since the first one came out. Don't play it expecting it to be much like 3000 or 3000 Unlimited, because it's a different ballgame from the beginning, and the key is strategy.

First, you've got a region instead of one city. Though you have some prefab regions, you basically create your own if you want to play another kind of terrain. First you've got to think about whether you want to just pick a tile and play one city or if you want to play a region, because the strategies are different. For a region, you've got to think about what kinds of cities you want to build and how they will relate to each other. And you'd better to it before you lay down the first road or zone.

Second, it's fairly easy to get a new city operating in the black right away, because you start out with $100,000 - sufficient funds to start a succesfull city if you don't try to expand to quickly. They key to success is to micromanage your finances. Since you can now set different tax rates for different classes of Sims, you can manipulate the tax levels to attract certain kinds of residential, commercial and industrial developers. You can also micro-manage your service buildings' budgets individually or through the budget panel by category.

Oh, and there are no random disasters anymore. As "God," you decide what major disasters are going to happen, as well as when and where. So, you don't have to turn disasters "off" because they are never "on" without your being in control.

The major "con" I noticed here was the "auto-street function. There are now "Roads," which are more heavily traveled and "Streets," less heavily traveled, in SimCity, and the good folks at Maxis have added a function that will automatically layout streets as you zone. Don't use it. Hold down the Shift key when zoning to avoid it and place your street where you want them.

So, if you're a fan of SimCity, and you have a relatively new, powerful system, get this game. If you accept it for what it i, and don't compare it to previous versions, you'll definitely enjoy it.

Big disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: April 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have owned every version of Simcity. By and large, they have all been very well done and obviously well-tested. This version is neither. So far, one patch has been released and another is imminent because of severe problems with performance and gameplay. It is apparent from gameplay that playtesting prior to release was insufficient. The time it takes to master this game, assuming that is even possible, is far too lengthy to make Simcity 4 enjoyable.
Given how many people are likely to be turned off by this release, we may be seeing the end of what was once the best sim series in gaming.

Is Sim City 4 A Slum???...Read On

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: March 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Sim City 2000 was an absolute dissappointment. It was extremely boring, and tiring.

Then came Sim City 3000, my favoite, with much more enchanced style and didn't look like a Game Boy game. It was very fun, and challenging at the same time.

Now, were up to Sim City 4. First thing, which is kind of weird, is it's name. Shouldn't it be Sim City 4000? Whatever, more about the game. Ok, I admit, my computer isn't really all that great. I have Windows XP, but with a SLOW 40GB hard drive, and only a 256MB memory card. But, still, all of my programs run fine, including Sim City 3000. But, not Sim City 4. Sim City 4 on my computer is almost unplayable. The game is slower than you would ever expect. It takes minutes sometimes for it to unfreeze. It does take up a lot of computer space, but still, it runs very choppy. The gameplay is much more difficult in Sim City 4 than 3000. Now, you have two modes, God and Regular. Also, the game is too challenging. The game expects you to have EVERYTHING just perfect. Things cost more, making more difficult to play. But not a fun kind of difficult, a kind of difficult that makes you want to take out the CD and crack it in half. The game does have it's high points though. The graphics are just outstanding, and far better than 3000. And, if your computer isn't slow, it can be kind of fun. But, if you see Sim City 3000 standing next to Sim City 4 for the same price, grab the 3000.

Patched Version

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: August 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've been waiting to get this game for a long time, I even got a new computer. Only to find out that my video card wasn't supported and the game wouldn't even run. However after a long search I found that there's an 'upgrade' on simcity.com. I'd hardly call it an upgrade in order to just get it to run. I still have the problem of residential units complaining the have no road access even though they are right beside a road. It seems this game was rushed out.

COMPLETE WASTE!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: March 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I wanted a fun game but I'd have to quit my job to play this thing. It took up so much memory that I noticed my NEW computer slowing down in all applications. I attempted to play close to 10 times and couldn't manage to get past a few starting tasks. I put it back in the box and have tried to return but Amazon.com won't take it back. I put it up for sale, no bidders. I heard that many buyers were going to EA Games to send it back and they would send you a NEW game to exchange at store for full refund, but my attempts at doing that were about as fruitless as playing the game. Don't waste your money like I did!

Simcity 4 - Great, but .....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: January 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

After months of waiting I got my copy of Simcity4 last Thursday night (9th Jan). I live in Hong Kong and the release here came before the US (or perhaps the store shouldn't have sold me the game until the 14th, but not my problem)...

Anyhow... the game itself is fantastic, graphics are great and there is a shedload of potential with region play, instead of just city play. It is also quite cool to watch your sims go about their lives in your city. There are however two criticisms. One is, I think, a result of limited PC resources and should be alleviated by playing in an online region, while the other can be corrected by good download sections on the Simcity site.

My criticisms have to do with the limitations caused by the region mode. FYI, Region mode puts your city ina region, say New York, in which the map is made up of about 50 cities, all available for you to develop. This is great because you can create and play as your city's "neighbours". The problem though is that the cities you create in your regions do not appear to grow or change while you are not playing them, accordingly, if you want to play mostly in mayor mode (similar to the old simcity), you have to keep changing to the other cities around you to keep them sufficiently built up to provide markets for your chosen city. This is probably an unfixable problem as I can only imagine what kind of PC would be needed to keep track of and provide constant AI for 50 growing cities at a time (especially since to allow you to be able to play them they'd have to grow properly... with roads, buildings etc etc, rather than just being basic statistics)... accordingly, this game will be much better played as part of an online cityscape which I hope will be there once the game is released worldwide. Perhaps, however, the developers could have provided an option to have the old style simple neighbours for those of us not as interested in the extended region play.

The other part of this problem is that the game does not ship with any pre-made neighbour cities (except for a small town or two in the London and Berlin regions). This makes starting out mighty difficult because your city is on its own until you do something about it. For those who have played before, this means no selling power or water to neighbours or taking their rubbish to bring in much needed seed capital, and also, your Commerce and Industry do not appear to benefit as much from connections, unless you go out and create those neighbours yourself (which brings you back to the same problem and takes hours of slow painstaking town building).

I hope that the full website (not yet released due to the earliness of my copy of Simcity4) will help to alleviate these difficulties with lots of ready to import neighbours and online region gameplay... I'll wait and see because once that problem is sorted, this game is going to be one of the best ever!

If you loved previous versions you'll love this one

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: February 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is much more complex than previous Sim City games (I've been a fan, and owned all of them since the original on my Amiga). I've been playing it non-stop since I bought it on the 27th Jan.

To trully appreciate the complexities you do NEED the strategy guide though; which is why I only gave it 5 stars.

However if you don't like this type of game you will probably hate it because it is HARD to master and has no difficulty setting.

The region play mode adds even more involvement than SC3K as you can design neighbor cities that have needs and then profit from selling or buying stuff directly from them or via arbitrage.

The graphics are much improved and the music is outstanding for a video game, with plenty of variety in genres.

Also the game runs fine on my machine (AMD XP 2000+ with Geforce 3 & 1GB RAM) even though it's over a year old. I think any one who bought a real computer (not Gateway, HP, Dell or any other mass market slug) in the last 12 months should have no trouble running this game at full detail level.

Review Page: Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Next 

Actions