Review: SimCity (NDS)

Zoning land for residential, commercial or industrial use; ensuring everyone has access to fresh water and electricity; providing schools, hospitals, and other civic amenities for the happiness and well-being of your population; introducing mass transit systems. None of these sound like particularly thrilling concepts for a video game, yet they are the very concepts that have kept gamers playing SimCity for nearly two decades. The joy of SimCity has always been the game’s ability to make the complicated task of a managing a city feel simple, intuitive and, above all, highly compelling. Now the game makes the move to Nintendo’s dual screen wonder - an obvious transition given the DS’s touch-screen function being a suitable replacement for a PC’s mouse.

However, once you start playing this game, particularly on the move, you’ll discover that the use of touch-screen control hasn’t been implemented as well as you might have expected. All too often you’ll find that you haven’t touched the square you thought you were planning to build on, but the one next to it. Laying long stretches of road or rail or power lines is fiddly and if you’re playing SimCity DS on a moving train or bus you’ll probably find yourself reduced to laying one square at a time in order to minimise mistakes - hardly conducive to playing a city building game on a portable system. The developers have clearly recognised this to be an issue, providing an “undo” button to remove mistakenly placed construction. Yet, maddeningly, there’s no option to “undo” demolition works. Just knocked down your own palatial mansion instead of the slums next door? Tough, because it’s not coming back.

Compounding the problems encountered with the fast and loose control system is the poor camera on offer. There are two levels of zoom available through which to view one’s city, both of which are misjudged. Of course, both of the DS’s screens are used, with the top screen being used to provide an overview of the city, whilst the bottom screen is used to zone development on. When the map is zoomed out, the top screen provides a reasonable overview of part of your city, but the grid on the bottom screen is so far out that it’s impossible to use effectively. Zoom the view in and everything’s so close that only a few new features can be built before you have to start scrolling the screen to carry on building or zoom the view back out to ensure that you’re putting things in the correct place in the context of your city. The display is also cluttered, with far too many cryptic icons dotting the lower screen in particular.

As if these weren’t already big enough problems, there’s also the fact that SimCity DS feels dumbed-down. Waterpipes no longer have to be laid, it’s enough to simply build a watertower; power will travel across any zoned or developed land, even roads, so very few power lines have to be laid. Careful civic planning is normally the key to success in SimCity games, yet this DS iteration seems to require little more than an ability to build plenty of residential zones well away from industry and other sources of pollution in order to be successful. The majority of the statistical information, even the budget screen, can simply be ignored with very little apparent detriment. The tutorials, of which there are plenty, tell you how to do things, but provide little insight into why you might want to do something. Similarly, the onscreen advisor, always available whilst building a city, will offer you hints and tips which seem to bear absolutely no relevance to what’s happening on screen. In addition, irrelevant, cash earning mini-games have been squeezed into the title. At Christmas you can expect to poke Santa with you stylus in order to put a few extra dollars in they city treasury. Whilst SimCity has always had its tongue firmly in its cheek, Gamestyle wonders if this isn’t a step too far.

Yet despite all these issues, SimCity DS still somehow manages to provide some fun. There’s something hugely satisfying about creating a thriving metropolis and to Gamestyle’s surprise, despite being thoroughly annoyed with the presentation of the title we found ourselves sinking a great deal of time into trying to create a bigger and better city than the last attempt.

In an attempt to add longevity and a more focused game type, a scenario mode is offered up in which a city must be saved from the brink of disaster. However, not only are these scenarios tough to master, the game can’t be saved during play (the DS cart supports just one saved game) meaning they must be beaten in one go or not at all.

As well as using the touch-screen, SimCity DS also pays lip-service to the DS’s other features, namely the microphone and local wi-fi connection. Should a fire befall your city, blowing into the microphone can extinguish it - fun for about 10 seconds before the novelty value wears off. The wi-fi feature is also painfully limited, allowing the exchange of notes and landmark building only and feels like a tacked on afterthought rather than a gameplay enhancing experience.

Ultimately, SimCity DS feels like a compromise, with none of its features really sitting comfortably on Nintendo’s handheld. There’s certainly some fun to be had here, particularly for the SimCity faithful, but clumsy presentation and a degree of dumbing-down means that SimCity DS falls short of the mark.

Rating: 5 / 10

Words by Andy Lucas