SimCity Societies

SimCity Societies is very different from other Sim games. We tell you why.

Attitude, that's what SimCity: Societies has in spades if time spent with planting creepy barns and gingerbread houses and fairytale palaces is any indication. It's attitude on a whole new scale that includes decidedly un-simulation-like fuzzy values like prosperity, creativity, spirituality, and knowledge. Forget stringing power lines and laying water pipe and incubating residential areas-this is not your geek-parents' SimCity.

Gone are SimCity 4's grid-like zones and pseudo-realistic municipal functions and general requirements to pore over every last metropolitan pixel. Instead, SimCity: Societies puts you in touch with your city courtesy a colorful beveled toolbar with cartoonish widgets like a power meter that's simply a needle on a red-yellow-green half circle or a satisfaction indicator that displays everything you need to know about your city workers' mental well being by mounting colored smiley faces on the ends of waxing or waning bars. In the middle, a tabbed build menu supplies place-able items like structures and decorations, while the game's new "filters" quickly organize those items according to touchy-feely "social energies" like "productivity" and "authority."

Simple City

If all that makes you squirm at the prospect of a less "sim-like" SimCity, bear in mind Will Wright himself had a hand in shifting the focus away from the series' harder-core base because of fears the series had shifted too far into pencil-protector territory. Here your city starts on much smaller swaths of grassland, tundra, or desert, ranging from flat to at most, slightly hilly.

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Cities tend to follow specific profiles, from self-explanatory ones like "small town" and "industrial" to abstract ideas like "capitalist," "fun city," "authoritarian," and "cyberpunk." Those profiles dictate what structures you can access from your build bar-build purely, and things tend to go smoothly, but mix-and-match, and the resultant incompatibilities tend to impede your progress.

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