Review: Simcity Societies simulation game

Previous Simcity games have concentrated on the mayoral aspect of city-building – the idea was that the player would put together a city from scratch, including roads, buildings, power generation and other objects.

Once the city was built, though, keeping it going involved delving into taxation, city budgets and similar, largely fiscal, aspects.

The new edition, Simcity Societies, takes things in a different direction. Essentially, it's the game's answer to virtual worlds such as Second Life.

The city-building is still here, but there's not much talk of taxation or money-making: although you still need an income to make the city work, it's more about balancing the citizen's happiness and productivity than about balancing the books. In the Second Life vein, the buildings are all customisable, so players can make the city look like they want.

It's true that, played this way, the game loses much of its interest for older players, and much of its difficulty; in fact, it can be quite easy to build up a huge city. But the same ideas that make it a dead loss for adults can make this game much more interesting for older children.

The game's developers have gone out of their way to make it child-friendly, in fact: you can pick from several kinds of city at the outset, one of which is a Fun one, ideal for teaching kids about how modern towns and cities work. There's a definite environmentalist slant, with benefits to building wind farms rather than coal power plants, but then that's been there since the first Simcity game back in 1989.

It's easy to pick up, too – the controls are big, bold and friendly, and there's a long tutorial that takes the player through all the things necessary to build a Fun city. It borrows heavily from The Sims, EA's spin-off series, in that you can zoom in to individual citizens and see how well they're doing.

Sound has never played a big part in these games, and it doesn't here. The background music is inoffensive. Graphics are fairly good, particularly if you've got a reasonably new computer and can turn up the detail settings. Even at low detail, though, it looked good, and we didn't need a very fast PC to get good graphics going.

It's true that the ease of play will make Simcity Societies quite dull for a lot of adult players, particularly experienced gamers. However, those who haven't played this kind of game before might find that it's an excellent introduction to the genre of so-called God games, and as a fun way to teach children about modern life and entertain them at the same time, it's going to be hard to beat.

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