Sim City BETA: first impressions

It seems slightly strange that just as I opened up this word document that ‘We Built This City’ by The Starship came on my iTunes. How apt, expect for the fact that I didn’t build my city on Rock ‘n’ Roll, but instead built on gambling and the like. (the other options, which were locked, were mining, oil, trading, electical goods and something else that I can't recall)

I’m getting side-tracked. This past weekend, I was one of the lucky few who got to experience the second Beta version of Sim City, and by all accounts it will be one of the games to get this year. Indeed, it is already has a lot of hype about it and rightly so: from the first screenshots and gameplay trailers  Maxis/EA showed, it looked impressive, but would the Beta live up to this hype? 

In short, yes it does. It is no big secret that I’m a fan of the Sim City games, having spent many hours of my life on the DS version, but even in Beta format, the game takes a leap forward like a cheetah launching after whatever they chase.  I don’t know much about animals, but what I do know is that a turtle is slow, a cheetah is quick and something else is in between them. Handily, these are the game speeds: when on cheetah mode, the game will advance at an alarming rate, perfect for those quick build cities in an hour, as we were limited to in the beta. 

Annoyingly in the Beta, a good 80% of roads, buildings, transportation options and the like were locked, which was annoying, but the fact that the game was so engaging even with most of the content missing is a huge bonus point in the game’s favour. I also got bored of the music after a little, but that was easily solved by muting it. My only major gripe was that the game wouldn’t go into full screen for me, but maybe I was missing a menu option…

Speaking of my system, I’m running an Acer Aspire 5750 laptop with an i5 2.5GHz processer and 6GB of ram. That should easily be enough to run the game according to the blumpf, and indeed it was: in my day of testing (the Beta lasted 24 hours), I didn’t experience any crashing or any problems. Considering the game was in a Beta stage, that’s mightily impressive. 

Maxis/EA has spoken at length about the region ability of the game, and while I wasn’t able to test it out by building a second city on a different terrain, I was able to look around the other spaces. From a quick glance, there’s something for everyone: from a seaside area, a mountainous and area and of course, the flat landscape that I was playing around in the Beta. You can also share services between cities: that’ll come in handy for me, I think, as I’m planning on having a space dedicated to powering my other city and also feeding it with water to save space – and pollution – in my ‘main’ city. 

See what I mean about it being an addictive game? The full game isn’t even released yet and I’m already planning out my cities in my head, and the teaser screenshots from Maxias/EA are really wetting my appetite for the full game. I can quite well see this being the game of the year now that GTA V has been delayed, and knowing Rockstar will be delayed again…

Bring on March 8^th! 

If you want any other information on my experiences with the game, you can tweet me. You can also pre-order the collector’s edition here.