SimCity 4

Lachlan Newman is the new cast member on 'Sim in the City'.

For many years, Maxis has simulated just about every single facit of life. From the smallest ant, to shaping an entire planet and just about everything in between, it has largely defined the entire 'Sim' genre. It comes with no surprise that Maxis has released the fourth iteration of its flagship product, SimCity. Aside from the obvious graphical improvements, the underlying focus of the game has changed slightly from its predecessors.

In previous SimCity games, the focus was purely on the buildings of your city, with the needs of your Sims only important as a source of tax simolians. However, the massive success of The Sims and the canned production of Simsville have lead to a more personalised version of SimCity where the inhabitants of your town are more central to the game than the number of high-density skyscrapers you have.

This personalised feel is displayed in the new MySims feature. Using either the Sims that ship with the game, or importing your own creation from The Sims, you can move up to five Sims into your town. They then provide information on the local level, either praising or condemning the city services within their immediate surrounds. Move a Sim into a low value home, and if your schools and colleges are effective, they'll eventually move up the social ladder, moving into a more expensive house and better job. Place them in a home with high surrounding pollution and poor health care, and they'll fall ill and eventually kick the SimBucket.

The economic model has had a fair reworking from SC3K. Your civic buildings now have a specific area of influence, which can be altered on a building per building basis. Sims complaining about a lack of education in their area? You can choose between investing in the future and building another school to cover the need, or pumping the funds into school busses and more teachers at the current branch.

At the other end of the scale, your cities are far more interactive at the regional level. Rather than just having one mega city covering all demands for housing, commercial and industrial needs, you'll be more likely to set up one city as a 'bedroom community' with your Sims commuting to nearby cities for employment, and your industrial city selling power to those who need it, without spoiling your urban paradise with pollution.

As mentioned, the graphics in SC4 are greatly advanced from its predecessor: rather than looking like a mass of pixels shoved onto a map, the buildings now look as if they could exist in a local city, orientating to the nearest road, and having architecture so the building can support itself. One problem with the graphics in SC3K was the repetitive nature of the tile set, where all the buildings in a suburb looked remarkably similar. This has been solved by creating a pool of different objects, say a swing set, clothesline, different roof colours, etc., and placing them randomly on the building lots. Coupled with MySims, this increases the amount of personality your city can have, as well as allowing the player to further relate to the people of the city and have neighbourhoods recognisable after decades of game time.

The graphics also allow for a more visual indication of how your neighbourhoods are progressing and overall how good your mayor skills are. If an area is devoid of police protection, then the buildings will look run down and generally not a nice place to live, while protected upper-class suburbs will have tree-lined streets and pruned hedges.

The same graphical indications ring true for the traffic system. Rather than having to query the road to see how heavy the traffic is, the cars now act as independent entities.

Depending on how roads and transit facilities have been placed, you'll either see the traffic flowing well, or faced with gridlock ahoy. Your road system is also essential for your emergency services. Call in a fire unit somewhere, and you'll have to wait for them to arrive from the closest station, so depending on your road design, you'll either have a puff of smoke or a firestorm to deal with.

SC4's increased depth on the local and regional level will greatly satisfy SimVeterans, but may prove to be a little difficult to new gamers to the series. It enhances on the winning formula, and does so in style.