SimCity is a game series with a very fine lineage. For nearly two decades, the concept of micro-managment expanded and diverged into multiple Sim spin-offs. However, once Maxis and EA created The Sims series and the bazillion new expansion packs (essentially a legalized form of printing money), they seemed to abandon the whole SimCity concept ever since. I guess EA thought they could milk the golden "Sim"-goose a bit more by returning to the city building concept with SimCity Societies, but they've done so without Maxis on board.

The basic concept of SimCity is simple - you are the mayor, you get a piece of land and some funds, and you are given the task of building a city, while keeping your citizens happy and the population growing.

But wait, this isn't SimCity

I know it says "SimCity" on the box, but the game on the CD, by Tilted Mill, has very little to do with the previous games of the superb SimCity series. Yes, you have a piece of land, there are buildings, and you end up with a city of sorts in the end, but the similarities end there.

The first thing you notice: there is no way to build electric lines or water pipes. In fact, there is no water system at all, and electricity "just magically works" - as long as you have enough production capacity somewhere on your plot of land, all your buildings are powered. Then you find out that there is no rail system or subway building either. Well, you can build subway stations but they just transport the citizens between any station in your city. You can't touch the terrain either - no raising or lowering, nothing. You are stuck with the area you created at the start. Madness!

So what can you do? You can build dirt roads and city streets, and you can place buildings - and boy, there are buildings. Tons of them, with many of them initially locked in the standard mode, requiring you to reach certain Value thresholds with your city before they become available. You no longer zone land for commerce, residential or industrial use, and then hope the residents and businesses find the area desirable enough to build in - instead you just drop in buildings. There are no maintenance costs either, so you can't really run out of money. In practice, if you do run out, just wait a while until your Workplace buildings generate some more funds for the city, and you can continue on your building spree. There are no taxes either - each revenue-generating building just supplies you with fixed amount every "workday".

Huh? No balancing of the budget? That is true. While the SimCity series never was that complex to begin with, at least it had this nice business side where you tried to zone and build responsibly; trying to keep the city budget balanced while funding police, fire department and other utilities. Societies takes the budget books and tosses them out of the window.

So, what's the deal then?

With the original SimCity concept pretty much binned, you may wonder "what's the point, then?" Well, there are these "Societal Values," a bunch of numbers affected by what buildings you add to your city: Productivity, Prosperity, Creativity, Spirituality, Authority and Knowledge. Each Home, Workplace, Decoration and Venue affects one or more of these Values, and if the Value goes negative, the latest building asking to "consume" that Value cannot operate until you somehow increase it back to positive with additional buildings. Your citizens live in buildings you can find under "Homes", they work (and generate revenue for you) in "Workplaces", and they spend their free time visiting different kind of "Venues" - keeping commutes between each type short is a good idea.

Infrastructure, beyond power plants and roads, is found under Workplaces, and yes, that means even the police station and fire station generates funds for you. Nice happy-fairy land it is, but I guess it's the side-effect of the silly "no expenses" financial model of the game. So in essence, you check the Values of your city, then plop down buildings based on what you need or can spend, mixing Homes, Workplaces and Venues somewhat evenly around the place, and that's it. That's the whole "game".

Sure, there are small special things, such as specialist Sims, Sim happiness levels and all the interactions how certain buildings affect things (such as revenue of nearby buildings), but when you boil it all down to the basic framework, there isn't a game here. It's all just a glorified dollhouse where you have to ensure these "Values" all stay positive. If you want, you can even switch to Free Play, which is the official toy set mode - all buildings are unlocked, and there are is no money or any Values limiting you.

Different cities

Lots of work seems to have gone towards providing numerous different "tilesets" - you can build corporate business cities, agricultural cities, authoritarian concrete hells, futuristic cyberpunk-style cities and many others - or you can mix buildings from all the different sets. While it offers some additional entertainment, giving a reason to start over with a different style and look, it doesn't really change things much, as far as the gameplay is concerned. You still build stuff to keep your population happy and the money flowing in. Authoritarian cities might build Secret Police HQs while Corporate one builds Consulting Firms. Different city types reach their goal of keeping the population productive in different ways, but the bottom line is that no matter the city type you pick, all you really do is put down different buildings to boost revenue, population and values.

CO2 is bad; magic H2 is good

I'm not sure if EA received money for it, but SimCity Societies is also "associated" with BP, who "Strongly supports the use of low carbon energy sources - in the virtual world and the real one" (quoted straight off the manual booklet). In practice this means that different power plants have carbon dioxide ratings, and if you go nuts with coal and oil plants, you end up with smog and unhappy Sims complaining about global warming. It's nice that games get environmentally active, but in SimCity Societies, the practical effect is that you get to choose between the polluting fossil fuel plants, or environmentally sound choices like wind power and the magical "hydrogen plant", which apparently generates it's hydrogen from nothing.

Low carbon dioxide plants are considerably more expensive to build when compared to the traditional choices, but as there are no maintenance or fuel costs for anything in the game, (and the money keeps on flowing in as long as you can keep your finger off the build buttons for a few minutes), there is no real reason not to drop in these magical hydrogen plants, and forget about the whole thing. If it only would work like that also in real life... Granted, they are not available in every tileset, so if you want to keep your city true to the style you have chosen, you may have to choose a less perfect option - but nothing in the game prevents you from dipping to the other tilesets for individual buildings.

Slideshow

SimCity Societies at maximum settings is also one of the worst slideshows I have seen. When maxed out with all the settings at High or Ultra, high end systems will produce a frame rate of four to six frames per second at 1600x1200 - that's with something like an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 and an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - making the game completely unplayable. It doesn't even look that impressive at these settings, just slow. Predefined "High" setting is actually far less than the maximum setting, fiddling some settings to medium, some high, and this "High" setting turns the game playable on today's high end systems, at least initially.

It's just that the performance keeps getting worse as your city grows, and a system that can happily push things around at predefined "High" setting at the start may have to drop down to "Low" when the city is all grown - every building and Sim added keeps on slowing down the game. The minimum requirements on the box are utter fiction; sure, you can start building a city, but everything will be a stuttering slideshow long before you can finish one - assuming you don't fall asleep before that.

The performance is completely CPU limited at higher settings. Shadows and lighting also affect things a lot and the frame rate can fluctuate wildly depending on the time of the day - on our test system at bit over predefined "High" settings the fps fluctuated between 20 and 60 depending on the time and the amount of activity on screen (at 1600x1200). A slower CPU showed linear scaling, and at the minimum recommended level, even with a top end video card, the frame rate was stuck to 30-35fps at daytime and half of that at nighttime. You still need a somewhat modern midrange card (or you have to at least ditch the shadows), but CPU is the most important bit.

On top of all the performance issues, the game keeps crashing on NVIDIA cards repeatedly - I initially tried to play the game on a GeForce 8800 GTX, but no matter what I tried, the thing kept crashing and locking up the whole PC every 10-20 minutes, until I just swapped the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT back in. I'm sure the problem will be patched sooner or later, but it speakes volumes about the QA process this game has gone through (ie. "Oops, Christmas is coming up, let's press the discs and patch later!").

Disaster

SimCity Societies is simply a horrible title. As a city building simulation it utterly destroys the fine lineage of SimCity games while unnecessarily reinventing the whole concept to be more like The Sims. In fact, the box should say "Sim Societies" - that would describe the contents far better, and who knows, players of The Sims might like the idea better; at least the UI and "gameplay" seems to be tailored towards them.

The only problem is that most of them won't have the hardware. If The Sims 2 and it's requirement for a DX9-level card was a harsh pill for the casual gamers who got used to being able to play The Sims on just about any PC in the existence, SimCity Societies happily trashes all those nice midrange systems people have bought for The Sims 2, asking for top end hardware to run the bloated city simulation and the buggy 3D engine. It's hard to believe that anyone could make a city building simulation that ends up having a too poor frame rate, but SimCity Societies manages to pull off this questionable trick.

It's really hard to recommend SimCity Societies to anyone. Casual gamers won't have the necessary hardware, SimCity fanatics are already planning to burn EA at the stake for the heresy of calling this mess "SimCity", and the rest of us - the more hardcore gamers - will drop the title in a hot second, as there is hardly anything you could call a "game" here. So, I recommend giving Societies a miss. It's not like the stores are devoid of good games at the moment.

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