SimCity review: one week later, time doesn’t heal all wounds
When we got our limited review copies of SimCity, EA implored us to wait until the game went live so that we could authentically experience the full multiplayer experience and hence see everything that the game had to offer. Heeding the company’s advice, we wrote up our initial impressions but held off on a full review.
Then the game went live, causing the game servers to promptly collapse under the load. EA frantically brought new servers online, improved its server code, and disabled certain in-game features in a bid to make the software at least somewhat usable. All things considered, the launch was pretty disastrous. Customers demanded—though did not receive—refunds, and EA offered everyone who bought the game a free second game as compensation.
Despite those early concerns, we've now had sufficient opportunity to try the game in the live environment EA suggested, seeing how the regional and global trading markets work with a population of tens of thousands of other players. As you'll see, our thoughts on the game have changed somewhat since those early impressions, but not really enough to overcome our initial opinion on the game.
Kyle: It's kind of impossible to start this review without addressing the server concerns that are still affecting the game. Personally, I didn't run into as many problems as were reported by others. I had trouble getting the game to show up in my Origin library a couple of times, and I saw my server listed as “Full” once when I tried to log in. Otherwise, I was able to play as normal. Maybe I was just lucky with my play schedule.That said, I was still impacted by the server issues thanks to the elimination of the Cheetah speed option, which is in its sixth day as I write this. It may sound like a minor thing, but the game is considerably less enjoyable to play without this speed option. A large part of playing the game, after you have a relatively stable city, is using Cheetah speed to move time forward quickly so you can gain more money and rapidly see if there are any developing problems about to pop up. At the next step down, Llama speed, the wait for these things is frustratingly slow, to the point where I found myself wanting to play the game less.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-one-week-later-time-doesnt-heal-all-wounds/
