Customer Ratings & Reviews

This game has many great features, but has some major flaws. The game is a great game if you just want to have some fun in single player. It offers some challenging situations in the story mode. Including: having traffic run smoothly, placing buildings to maximize money earned, and making all your sims happy. Its amazing that your city can have over 50,000 sims and each one has its own name and you can follow what they are about to do. A major flaw is the online play. It can take as long as an hour to get in an online game. Something that really disappointed me was the city size. Right now I give this game 3 stars, but if EA can fix at least some of the problems, I would give this game 5 stars.

Sim City was the first PC game I ever played (the very first one) so needless to say I was very excited about this release! The problem is that EA has ruined this game. It is now day two and I've been able to play for maybe an hour total. Here is what I don't like: - Internet connection is mandatory. This really gets me.. this is supposed to be a single player game. Why do I have to be online to play it? - They make you sign up for their gaming community they are forcing upon players "Origins" I should not have to sign up for anything just to play my game. I think this is pretty shady marketing.. - The servers are constantly going down as they cannot handle the load of launch. Even if you want to just play by yourself, you cannot if the servers are down - Queue times to be able to play. I waited in queue for 30 mins today just to get kicked right off the server again. - The getting started tutorial does not work - I bought two copies so my girlfriend and I could play together. The invite friends option does not work - If you try to invite a friend and then claim a city, it says the city is already claimed and you cannot claim it (even though you already did). This forces you to go back and recreate your region - Roads are buggy. They don't connect or intersect with other roads in some areas even though there is no reason for them not to - When placing roads (and spending a ton of money on them) you cannot zone next to the road even though there is plenty of space around it I can actually go on more and more but I think you get the point. The game seems pretty fun (the hour of which I've played) and if you are considering buying this I WOULD WAIT until EA figures this out. They are going to need to patch the heck out of this game to fix all the bugs and maintain server stability. Unfortunately really... you would think they would have the resources to figure this out by now.

the maps are just to small to customize your city the way that you want it and add all the features the game offers like universities bus stops airports ect....but you will have fun playing it if your a reall simcity fan i just wish the maps would be bigger

Fun to play. So much hate towards the always on DRM, but I haven't had too many issues with it so far. I didn't own the game until 2 weeks after release however, so I must have avoided the nasty launch issues. Game is fun to play, with hours going by unnoticed. Cities are beautiful. Not a big fan of the multiplayer aspects however. Not really a game where you're gonna interact much with other players in your region since everyone seems to move on abandoning their cities or are online at different times. Not really a multiplayer game imo, like a typical shooter or rpg where the community is a big part. In that respect, the online requirement is probably a big unnecessary hindrance to many.

Game takes almost 2 hours to install with all of the updates that must be uploaded. Then the only thing you can get after 2 hours are server errors. There is no way to play this game without internet connection. This is where all of the problems start.... I don't know if it is the load on the servers.... poorly thought through... but it seems a little idiotic to me to design a game that must be connected to a server to play... and then not have enough capacity on those servers. This means the game is completely usless.... it is a $60 frisbee. EA is offering refunds for people who downloaded the game from them.... Best Buy is refusing to take returns though... very disappointed with Best Buy when the manufacturer is offering refunds due to a defective product... Best Buy will not. Avoid this game unless you like server errors.

Well let me start off by saying the game is great graphically. After you get everything up and running and have a couple of cities in the region the game starts showing its true colors. The game started freezing about 40+ hours of play. I have 4 developed cities and they transact with each other. My main city has a lot of bugs including recycling, data maps incorrect, incorrect school info, disappearing money, and then I built a great works. Now I started it in one city and after pouring TONS of resources into it I was like what is going on... I checked my other city and it shows its completely built??? (Youtube video is posted) I know EA is working on the swath of bugs, but you would be better off buying something else and waiting at least 6 months. I have waited a month for the bugs to get fixed and they are still not even close. Head over to the EA forums to see how many problems people are having. They have even disabled tons of features so that crashes occur less, but they have given no timeline fixing anything. If I could go back I wouldn't have purchased... way to many issues.

Expect this if you buy it now: 1. You can’t play if servers are unavailable. 2. Most of the time you can’t login to a server, even when it says is “available”. 3. The servers are “Busy” most of the time. It makes you wait 19 minutes just to “attempt again”. 4. It stays on Splash Screen, “Downloading Scripts” or “Checking for updates” 5. If you are lucky enough to login on a server and able to start the game, most of the time you won’t be able to claim a new city (start a new city) or open a saved one. 6. If you get disconnected from the server, it could return to the main screen, losing all recent changes to the game. I am hoping they fix this soon, but I don’t think it is going to happen, since it has so many bugs on the game. You should wait a little longer, especially if you can buy it at a lower price.

Overall this game is slightly fun when you put aside the bugs. Doing that is nearly impossible to do though. As soon as you begin having any high density development major traffic problems make the game unplayable. The extremely small map size makes it impossible expand you city larger than the size a neighborhood would be in real life. I won't even begin to go into the massive amount of other bugs. EA continues to sell a broken game at full price, while selling over price DLC that helps to somewhat fix the problems that they refuse to fix that would actually make this game playable. I would not recommend this game to anyone, unless you feel like throwing away your money.

I deliberately waited until the server issues resolved to rate this game. While those issues play a factor in the overall experience (they did after all fail to give paying customers what they paid for when they paid for it) my score is more a factor of the gameplay itself. It is no secret that the game suffers from a dramatically reduced scope than previous Sim City games. This is a function of their push to make the game "social" which just isn't for me. I found myself wanting to play in long bursts with long stretches of not playing it in between. This just doesn't match how most everyone else was playing, and meant that multiplayer wasn't the best experience for me. I tried playing it single player, managing multiple "cities" at the same time, but it was tiring, and never seemed to work right (It always seemed that for multiple cities to really work together they have to be running at the same time and not just toggled back and forth). Ultimately, the limited city size makes for a very limited single player experience. For more dedicated multiplayer players, I am sure the experience would be better.

If you're thinking of getting this game, wait a few months to see if things get better. I bought the CD thinking it would be faster to install the game and play. I still had to wait 4 hours for it to download the game and it crashed twice due to server issues. 1. The game is for online play only. At first I thought okay that shouldn't be to bad I've played online games before with no issues. Not this game 80% of the time you can not get on a server to play. The other 20% of the time if you start to play it will kick you off or the game stops working because the server is busy.

You can only play this game online. You are not buying the game but paying to play it on their servers. I believe its a waste of money. If you cant play the game on your computer and save your game on your computer then why pay $60? Why not pay an online gaming price of $15 or $20. With no internet connection you can not do a single thing. Just be aware of this before you buy! I wish I could take it back and get my money back! The game probably isnt even on the disk I paid $60 for. There is probably just a download request. WASTE OF MONEY!

I long anticipated this game, I've been a fan of Simcity since Simcity 2000, I loved it, I loved Simcity 3000 and Simcity 4. I LOVE the graphics and Audio. At first you couldn't log onto the servers, but that has been fixed. There are many bugs in game that still should be dealt with, especially with traffic, the sims take the most direct route to their destination, and if there is alot of these sims. Avenues and roads get clogged. Mass transit can help, but if you have too many buses, it will only add to the traffic problem. I like the fact that you can specialize a city, with Tourism or mining, etc. I find it quite enjoyable. Map sizes are my weakness in this game. In Simcity 4, There were 3 different map sizes to choose from, but that is now gone. There is very limited space to build residental, commerce and industrial, and when you specialize a city. It only takes up more space. Leaving less for RCI (Residental, Commerce, Industrial) Personally, I would recommend it, but if you dont have a stable internet connection. Do NOT buy this game.

I see everyone else rated this game with a 1 star rating due to server issues. Maxis has been resolving this issue as of this weekend and is even gving folks a free EA game title on Mar. 18th as a way of trying to mollify us folks that purchased it and were having troubles connecting to their swamped servers. I have had no issues connecting to their North American servers as of Saturday evening. I am not a big fan of having to play solely online but, the experience hasn't been bad. The game itself is pretty fun. After a short tutorial that explains most of the games bells and whistles, you are provided with several different areas to start your own city. The graphics are nice and the in-game sound is decent as well. You have the ability to play in sand box mode (which I like personally# or play one of their city scenarios #with it's own set of city challenges). You can also either play solo or multiplayer. Mulitplayer offers you the opportunity to trade extra power, water, garbage collectors, and various other resources amongst different cities. Be advised that once you buy the game, it's going to take about 3 to 4 hours to set up an Origin Account, download the software from their servers, install the updates, and then you can finally play. This game has potential and is a must have for anyone who enjoyed the Sim City games from the past. If you don't mind doing the initial long process of downloading the game for the first time and also, don't mind always having to be connected to the internet to play, then this game is for you.

I decided to buy the game today despite reading all of the horrible reviews about the servers. Luckily I haven't had any issues them, although I do think it's ridiculous that you must have an internet connection to play. Overall the game is very fun and very addicting much like the older SimCity games. My only gripe is the size of the city maps. SimCity 4 had a variety of map sizes, however, in this game all of the city maps are exactly the same size. They are fairly small and I have already run out of space in one of my cities. If you liked SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4, I would definitely recommend this game.

If the game plays it's loads of fun. However, the following issues negate any and all reasons to have bought it. 1. Online only and most servers are usually full. Ergo, you cannot even begin to play the game. 2. If you're lucky enough to get connected to a server, your game progress is saved locally to that server. If you go back the next day and that server is full (or) down then your game progress is lost. If you choose a different server, your game progress is lost. 3. Heavy server traffic may prevent you from even creating a new game if you're even lucky enough to start the game and get connected to a server. 4. Game cannot save at times. Since everything is online based you're at the mercy of their servers successfully saving your game. You have no control. This in of itself is ironic since Sim City was built on the foundation that you, the user, have control with building. 5. If I could return this game and get a refund I would. This was a mistake to buy.

This is not the game you would hope for. You have to be online to play this, similar to Diablo 3. It's a Cloud game so everyone has to be connected to the EA servers to play. There are only a few servers for the 10 million people trying to play. The result is unable to connect, server crashes, lost data (there is no save option for your cities), etc... Stay away from this title. It's terrible.

This game was almost famous, for whatever reason they decided to require an online connection to play this game. Which means you have to connect to their servers to play. The game itself is fantastic. Everything I would hope for for a game with the Sim City title. However the fact you just spent $60+ for a game your not likely going to be able to connect and play with until they can get a handle on their system, simply sucks. I expected more from EA in knowing that they need to have beefy servers ready for game releases and traffic. They aren't new to this.

Okay, so I don't love the game. Having grown up on SimCity, SC2000, and SC3000, it isn't the best successor I could imagine based on the history of the franchise. The lack of any offline single-player mode is especially frustrating, mostly because I worry that in a couple years the servers will be shut down and the game will be worthless - and I've been known to play the original SimCity as recently as a couple years ago. But, it is an entertaining game to play, and now that some of the early bugs are getting worked out, I enjoy it. And really, that's what matters the most, right?

I've never had any server issues of this game. I guess having played online MMOs for several years, the always online requirement of SimCIty isn't a big deal for me. I wish the plots were bigger and the traffic more manageable (even with the best streets and lots of public transportation support). I enjoy playing with my boyfriend with the both of us trying to outshow the other. The buying of energy, water, etc. feature from another city is nice too.

the game says in BOLD print: Requires a Persistent Internet connection, servers are being brought online to accomidate the load, and Woe be to those that whine when they decide to stop playing that EA shuts servers down! give it TIME! don't just Gripe and MOAN because of one or two or three days of not playing because of server stuff.. oh and those that say your progress isn't spanning to other servers: it's a game that requires you to choose a place to play!! of course you will have to chose and if you chose differently, you will not have the same progress!!!