SimCity 4 (PC)

If "The Sims" is a dolls house, then "Sim City" is a train set.The graphics (see the SimCity Web site) are if anything better than they appear on screenshots. Yes, you can zoom right down to the point where you can see individual Sims walking along the road. Quiet neighbourhoods look, well, quiet. Lively ones are noisier.It's fun just to take a look around. In a dodgier bit of one of my cities I found a crime scene taped off...Compared with previous versions the game has been cleverly tweaked to make it less easy to run out of money. If you do run out of cash, useful little money-making extras (such as a state prison, or an army base) are made available to balance the books.A couple of goes and it's easy to make a nice big city with skyscrapers, schools, and happy Sims. And did I mention trains?It's not all perfect - not yet. As before it often happens that clones of the same businesses appear next to each other. Would you really expect four flea markets next to each other?Importing Sims into the cities is a nice touch, and works well in combination with the zoomed-in view: you can see them go to work and follow their journeys. But their reports do add to the "news clutter", competing for attention with messages from the different city advisors.Cities are now part of a large region, so different cities can have different roles within the region. This greatly extends the game play. There's no limit to the number of different regions.Four stars, as I'm waiting for the version where you find yourself at street level and drive around in perspective view... There's no sample cities, just blank regions, although the SimCity Web site will apparently allow regions and cities to be shared between players.Note, you'd better make sure you've got a reasonable PC - at least 1GHz - and a good graphics card. All that eye candy takes horsepower, lots of it. My PC chugs sometimes when switching views which is somewhat frustrating. And the game is BIG - two CDs full, about 1Gb in all. At least it runs on Windows XP, which is more than SimCity3000 did.

I was really excited about getting this game, in all honesty i expected more from it.It's nice building up a city, but it gets a little repetative when you have to make sure that you build schools and shops near a bunch of houses. In the end a lot of my cities started to look the same. And the only reason I started new cities was because as soon as I started playing I went bankrupt - very frustrating. Also, I dont know if anyone else had this problem, but I cannot seem to make the trains work. I bought an expansion pack for this game, back in january, because it needed something more, to keep me entertained, but by the time it arrived I was already bored of sims city, so I still have not opened it. Maybe I will get round to it, and enjoy the game. But overall I'm not a big fan.

I expected big improvements on the earlier Sim City version that I also own, and I got them!Although not hugely improved in graphics, Sim City 4 does boast a few more great features.New CitySmarts mean that every single thing that you do in your city has an effect on the city. Too much industry can cause pollution and make your city undesirable, causing a knock-on effect to the residential zones of the city. High-rise residential zones bring in only certain types of people.As before, you can change the land that you will build your city on before you begin. You also have a God Mode. This gives you the control to cause earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, fires, meteors and other disasterous results!Im not going to spoil the game too much so Ill leave it there. If you are a sim fan, buy the game and judge for yourself on the improvements!

found this game rather disappointing when compared to other sims games and therefore do not rate this game particularly highly

Couldn't install it - oh well!Cheap mistake so not that bothered...read spec but seemed my PC still would not run it.

It works and it's good. But as you know it's old. SimCity 4 Delux is quite better than this one.

Preferred the original but still good nevertheless.

After a long wait i got this game about 3 week ago and i have only played it for a week and now i try and try to get back on the game after a 2 weeks of not playing it and it will not let me back on to the game so for me game is not good and a wast of money buying it.