SimCity 4 Review (Rare80)
After all these years, and all the city builder sims that have came after it, SC4 is STILL the gold standard for city building sims everywhere. Even with as good of a game as City: Skyline is, and it does some things way right, and has things I wish SC4 had, (like districting, and road building) is still doesn't feel as deep or as compelling as SimCity4 does. I fell that's it's way too easy to hit a "ceiling" in City: Skyline. After a while, I get a sense that I've done all I can do and have nowhere do go but start a new city, and start all over again. Meanwhile, in SC4 there are always new things to tackle and new problems to fix. I spend most of my time playing SC4 staring blankly at my screen, pondering my next move like a chess master. That's what I love the most about this game.
It makes you think.
The only drawbacks about this game is the frequent crashing. This was an issue that was present with original disk I had of this game way back in the day, but it now seems exacerbated on the Steam version. It will crash about ten or so minutes into the game about 40% of the time. This is beyond annoying and breaks any concentration you might have if you're constantly worried about saving. Also, I found that certain mods run a lot less seamlessly with the Steam version of the game as well. Perhaps I need to look a little more into this, but a lot of the highway mods I loved using on the disk version of the game, really tug the game down. I excepted the Steam version of the game to run much better which was why I bought it instead of buying a used diskset like I've done before in the past. I dunno whether to blame Steam or EA for the game's performance, but I assume it turn a lot of younger player away from this game when the game has real troubles running for more than a half an hour. Which is a shame as it's still the best city sim of all time.