City building returns to the 1001 list with the series that started it all, Sim City 4. Where previous games would have you fill up a small plot of land (well, a large plot, but still only one plot), this sequel has you build city after city in giant, connected, neighbouring regions. It allows you to create a monstrously big city spanning a scale you've not seen in this genre before.
I hope you're not daunted by blank canvases...
Fun Times
It's been a while since I played a city builder. I uninstalled Cities Skylines because each time I started, the vision in my head didn't match the visuals on my screen, and I was immediately annoyed at how there wasn't a fully developed city in front of me after five minutes. That's a stupid reason to quit a game, but brains are silly sometimes.
With that in mind, you'd have thought that I would struggle to start Sim City 4, but it was quite the opposite. Knowing this is an older game that does things differently, I had no idea what a fully furnished city would look like, so have nothing in my mind to work towards, and can then just plop roads and utilities down.
Thus begins the city of Los Thope. The immediate thing of note is that zoning areas for residential properties, industrial complexes and retail sectors, pre-made roads get added to the zone, ready for the individual plots of land and the numerous new citizens that will soon swarm in to take them.
It's an excellent idea, saving time and giving players some suggestions for what shape the city might take. It's not perfect, as your roads probably won't line up over time, but it tries its best, and I welcome it.
Your first port of call is to provide power and water to your zones, running pipes underground and all that, and once that's good to go, your city just springing up as though it was part of nature itself.
Well, the houses and shops and whatnot do. All the utilities - your power, your sanitation, your healthcare, education and so on - are directly plopable onto the landscape, each providing an often vast zone of coverage for their particular speciality.
With a sizable hospital in the middle of the city, ready to go, it's probably a good idea to start educating the locals so that they can go on to get a job there, so I plop a school down near all these new homes and wait for time to pass.
Apparently, my advisors have some cause for concern regarding my actions. It's too early to build all this stuff, it seems, and we should cut their budgets until they need more funding. I mean, it makes sense, I suppose, but it sounds like effort.
City builders are all about spreadsheet balancing. If you're spending more than you're bringing in, your city will fail. For someone who enjoys the building part of city builders, and not the managing of their budgets, this is a bit of a faff, and a whole section of the game I'm probably not going to get the hang of any time soon.
My transportation dude raises the all-important problem of traffic congestion, so we upgrade a couple of roads to please the people for the time being and get back to providing the citizens with somewhere to go.
At least, that was my plan until they wanted to welcome me into the city with my own mayoral mansion.
Sat high up on the hill overlooking the city, the surrounding suburbs immediately start being built upon. I probably should have removed the zoning for this block to give me a bit more space...
Oh look, these water pipes have been doing nothing all game. What else isn't going right for this city?
As expected, various graphs and overlays allow you to see where various problems may be found. Lack of water, pollution, traffic problems... there's an overlay for everything, but if you don't like the level of detail there, maybe you would prefer to thrust a microphone into the face of a Sim and see what they think of their situation.
Is that a lack of education? If it is, I'm sorry. The school was built, but my advisor doesn't want to give it a lot of cash right now...
Frustrations
As my city continued to grow, I was noticing the graphics more and more. If you've not noticed by now, you are locked into this isometric kind of view (it's not strictly isometric, I don't think). Having come from Cities Skylines with its sweeping zooms and rotating camera, being forced to view Los Thope from only one angle is a struggle sometimes.
The zooming isn't smooth and sometimes inaccurate too. I'll want to zoom into somewhere and somewhere else will come into view, and at this scale, you'll soon see the quirks of the engine.
These 'no road access' icons alerted me to the area initially, but then I was alarmed to see how buildings were built on this hillside. Entire lots jut into the sky, creating ridiculous-looking landscaping across what I hope will turn into a lovely city.
It's a thing that is happening everywhere, and at this stage of the game, making the mountains flatter will be costly. Terrain manipulation is something you can do at any time, but you really should do so before founding a city. I'll remember that for next time...
After opening up Los Thope to the outside world with a harbour and a road off the map, my advisor jumps in one more to say that I seriously ought to do something about my spending, either stop it or raise taxes to cover it all.
I can't be bothered with all these numbers. Can't I employ a taxman to just chime in with suggestions that I can accept or reject? I'm a designer, damn it, not a businessman.
Ugh, that's some horrible design, though. These hills are challenging to build on.
Further Fun Times
With some sort of irony, surely, I'm given the option of having a statue made in my honour. Before realising how tiny it is, I place it at the end of the beach (or what I hoped would become a beach, but Sim City 4's beaches are all rectangular for some reason) as a Colossus of Los Thope. The only colossus it manages to achieve is a colossal waste of money.
There's only one thing to do with this mess of a city. It needs... cleansing...
Dude, get out the way, I want to see meteors rain down from the heavens.
That was underwhelming if I'm honest. Maybe a giant robot can stomp my neighbours' landscaping into something more natural on the eyes.
No, that didn't really do much either. I think there's only one other option.
That's more like it. Bloody hell, those hills are ridiculously bumpy. Where are my God tools...
Final Word
After nearly an hours worth of city building, I was done with Sim City 4. I liked what it offered me, but the presentation isn't my cup of tea. I'd love to be able to free the camera up just so I can get a better sense of what I'm zoning out or plonking down.
I suppose that if there's only one angle to view your city in, then there's only one angle you need to make pretty, but it feels restrictive. Then again, that's how these games always were, before technology allowed more camera movement. The various buildings do generally look really detailed. There's a car sales lot that uses ugly car sprites, but it has balloons that drift in the wind, so... net positive in terms of looks?
You could quickly lose yourself in building region after region here, hoping to balance the books of them all, perhaps even getting them to work together somehow. Do energy, or services span the state lines? Do citizens commute from one region to another? I've no idea.
There is an awful lot of data to sink your teeth into if your goal is to build some kind of self-sustaining utopia, but perhaps the best thing Sim City 4 offers are player-created mods. I'm not sure exactly what kind of mods, but I read that some of them fix the stupidity of the citizens. They can drive through the streets getting madder and angrier at the state of the traffic, completely ignoring the subway you've built outside their house, for example.
If you don't touch the mods, is Sim City 4 worth playing? Playing, yes. Playing a long time, probably not. It's showing its age, and not just in the graphics department. It's a bit sluggish and clunky, and I can only imagine how it holds up with an entire map filled to the edges.
Persist with it, though, and you've got your own little sandbox city to play around in. If you ever get bored like I did, you can hurl natural disasters at it just to see what happens. Excellent.
Now, should I reinstall Cities Skylines and try that again...
Fun Facts
If you feel the need to drive around your city, you can take control of a car and turn it into an open-world driving simulator of sorts. You can even populate named Sims into town, and follow their daily lives through your city - perhaps even having imported them from one of the Sims titles.
Sim City 4, developed by Maxis, first released in 2003.
Version played: Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition, PC, 2004.