Mediocre experience and a flop of a launch.

I think I do not need to explain that SimCity was a bad game.

The main argument for this was of course, the disastrous launch in which many players could not even play their eighty dollar “EA greed” deluxe game, because the servers could not handle it and you could not play the game locally. Although the issues were eventually fixed, the fact that you must fear a new outage on the EA servers at all times, was a terrible taught and immediately killed the fun of the game (or what was left of it).

Another big issue was the save file corruption. After the billionth outage of the servers, I (and many others from what I understood) lost my save file and could start all over again. Why? Because the servers could not handle/register the file of course.

In the basis, SimCity is just a reboot from the SimCity series, running a new engine. Of course, the new engine offers more simulation, functionality and features than the last one from ten years ago, but it did not perform as well, which resulted in multiple issues. But besides the technical and “always online” issues, the game itself was also really bad. The mechanics were broken, the game looks ugly and “blurred out”, sound is “OK”, and the feeling of a alive and flourishing city was not present in my opinion.

Anyway, you start with an empty plot of land, place your first piece of road, and start building a neighborhood. You earn some money, build extra facilities, needs for your citizens and expand rapidly. You create industry, commerce, keep an eye on your citizen’s demand for electricity and water, the pollution levels and overall, manage your city into success.

The trading system with neighboring cities (other players) was really cool and, despite my dislike for this game, the best feature of the game. You could choose for yourself what kind of city you would become, which specialty or resource made your city famous and trade that resource with other players.

My worst experience with this game, besides the technical problems, where the graphics in this game. SimCity has relatively detailed structures, landscapes and facilities, but when zooming in, to watch your glorious city, all people and cars are under some layer of smog, bloom or blur. It looks terrible. It is just like I am watching a colored river of excrement, moving in the bottom of my screen. When zooming out, it looks kind of okay but compare this to Cities: Skylines, and the difference is night and day.

The sound is just “ok” and has nothing to offer, besides the memorable “SimCity ping sounds” from the previous installments.

The controls, interfaces and reports are simple to understand and a little less detailed and complicated then some other city builders.

To summarize, my fun with this game was killed right at the start, with the launch issues, server issues, always-online crap and save file corruption. When I could finally play the game properly, the motivation to do so rapidly dropped, and when the player base died out soon after that, and the trading with other cities became obsolete, I was done with it.

Although it does not matter that much anymore, I would not recommend this game to anyone. With the knowledge of today, the only way to go is Cities: Skylines.

(Winner of "Blunder of the Year" Award, speech below)
What happens when you take a beloved franchise, and shove always-online DRM right up its ass for no reason than to force people to play online? You get Diablo III. And that’s the point where EA looked at Activision and said “We’re not going to make that mistake, no sir, we are not launching with a broken online service, We’re going to do one better and break the whole fucking game AND the service ” and so in 2013 EA gave us Sim city, a bloated shambling corpse of a game that hardly worked even if you could get it to run during the launch. And sure, the game works -now-, but the damage is done, after many people’s saves were deleted or ruined by griefers using exploits, we all moved on, and Sim City will forever serve as a reminder how Electronic Arts got its name, because their ability to fuck up electronic entertainment is truly an art form.

(Winner of "We're Sorry®" Award for most egregious technical problem, speech below)
Did anyone NOT see this one coming? SimCity took the same route as Diablo 3, and believed that, in a vain attempt to stop online piracy, they would release a game with an always-online internet connection. Here we are not even a full year later, and they’re already patching it out due to their idiotic mistakes.

Getting down to the meat of why this game was chosen, it’s fairly obvious to say that the always-online DRM didn’t work. The game was unplayable on launch, for up to three days afterward as well, and finally started to open up after everyone returned their copy and gave up. Even after the servers came up, the game was unresponsive, and usually had a 500+ ping for even the best, and closest connections to the servers, and wouldn’t even refresh neighboring cities, the major feature of the online functionality, for several hours at a time. Overall, it’s just the game that should have never been, and as a fan of the SimCity franchise, it really does hurt me to say that.

But hey, at least… they’re “sorry.”