Customer Reviews
Don't Buy This Game 
2008-06-15
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.
Patch #5 and still not working correctly 2008-06-13
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.
Sim Societies 
2008-05-20
I might be able to write a credible review, but it wont even run on my system! I'm running XP Pro, 4gb memory, S3 video, but only displays black background with green outlines if you zoom out. Totally frustrating, I don't bother with this any more.
Not so bad 
2008-05-19
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.
If you liked the previous releases....stay away from this one 2008-05-11
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.
Don't go near this game. 2008-07-15
ok, so, theres not much i can say about this game. mainly because it wont start up! i have all the system requirements. i'm running windows XP media center edition. i'm on patch #5 already and it still won't start up. unfortunately, i didn't read the other reviews about this game before i got it and i'm sad that I didn't. and their tech support is no help whatsoever. they have nothing in there about this error. trust me, i checked everywhere. and it won't uninstall. well, thats spelling out *Virus like Software!* right there. i heard theres alot of other bugs with this game. so i'm sure that evem if i do just happen to get it running, something else is bound to happen. so, basically, i really can't recommend this game at all.
A Hybrid with little depth of play but fun for new gamers 
2008-07-05
I have played Sim City and The Sims and liked the idea of building a city based on community values. But this is more of a pretty construction set than a challenging game. First there is no depth to that promised value system. You can put in lots of temples and churches, Orwellian interrogation sites or get heavy into high rises, but you the game play does not differ significantly from one value system to the next. Buildings give or take away points and you are forced to do silly things like insert a ridiculous number of fountains or Real estate offices in order to get enough Prosperity points to build seemingly unrelated items like golf courses, restuarants and hair salons. Adding three fountains to build a hair salon isn't very challenging.
I was hoping that you could stipulate a series of values and let them determine how the people reacted, rather than just building pretty cities. As mentioned in another review, as long as the power is on, you can build a huge city with no water treatment plant, sewerage system or garbage collection. The idea behind the game is a good one but I think combining that idea with the Sim City format was not. The game concept would work much better as an interactive adventure where you play a character and interact directly with citizens to learn how to navigate in their society.
The game ran pretty well on my system but the auto saves were annoying as they occur often and completely halt game play while the program writes to disk. I also found the road tool to be problematic as it seldom correctly reads a simple turn, creating instead a small maze of roadways.
I bought the game yesterday, played it for about 4 hours and the result of that is a medium sized city, lots of medals that don't mean much and a crew of happy citizens. I used the tutorial to start and then built the majority on my own using the "normal" level of difficulty. Since I don't have gigs to burn on my hard drive, I will probably take this game off by tomorrow and end up passing it on to a family member. If you are new to gaming and want to have some fun I highly recommend it as it is much easier to do well in this game than either Sims or Sim City. You can even use it to teach your young kids about living "green," showing them firsthand the effects of pollution and overcrowding.
If you are a serious gamer not into teaching children, you will likely get bored very quickly and should probably skip this one.
So-So Effort, but not a true Sim City 2008-06-27
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!
waste of time 2008-06-16
Overall this game has completely disappointed me. I've been playing Sims 2 and the Civilization series for a very long time and so I've really grown to love management and development games. One of my friends suggested i look into Simcity because it falls in more of a middle area between the two game types.
Unfortunately i started with simcity societies. This game seems like a very simple game where the only real point is to drop random buildings down and try to create one of 6 ideal society types. The buildings have no real relation to one another. For instance if i put a trash collecting plant down it really has no effect on anything especially the cleanliness of the city. If i put a burger joint down versus a tanning salon there is no real difference accept that one may make more money then the other.
You never feel like your managing a living breathing city which really should be the goal. You can't really make any personal touches to anything. And by the end of it all you've earned is a trophy or two that don't give anything worthwhile and an empty feeling that you tend to get after wasting alot of time doing absolutely nothing,
Hopefully this series dies with this one or moves back to its roots and dumps the current development team.
A so-so game 2008-06-15
I ended up selling this game to some one. It's decent and definately has better graphics than the past sim cities. However, I found the game play to be poor and generally boring. Once I created the city, it got boring really fast. I think it could use more mini games or something like that. Buy it and play it. But you may get sick of it quicker than you think.
