![]() There's an incredible amount of detail when you drop to street level, down to individual pedestrians. The GlassBox engine, developed especially for the game, cleverly mimics the effect of tilt-shift photography, and it looks beautiful. Watching your city grow is fascinating, as leafy suburbs are replaced by luxury apartments, and enormous skyscrapers spring up in your commercial districts. Not the perfect game but fun nonetheless.At first it's fiendishly addictive. It's a bit of an old game, but runs fairly well via DOSbox as provided by GoG. Definitely worth a try for anyone who's curious. Even if you're like me the scenarios, learning the fundamentals and fulfilling these goals will take a decent chunk of time and won't feel wasted. It's not a game that will appeal to everyone, but it's one that can be a lot of fun and potentially provide hundreds upon hundreds of variable and emergent gameplay for anyone who delves deep into the sandbox mode. Missions that involve natural disasters can be equally as tedious and chaotic but once you handle things it also provides that same degree of satisfaction. Destroying large parts of cities can be extremely tedious and time consuming, quite a chore all things considered, especially if you fail the mission and have to replay it, but, it comes with the extremely satisfying pay off of being able to sit back and watch the problems of the city self correct and the planning you made slowly resolve. Since most of them are time limited there's no issue in thinking extremely short term and maxing out on loans and eating huge deficits until the mission is considered successful. Many of the objectives are very similar, and simply amount to destroying huge swathes of the provided city and rezoning them to high population and lowering taxes to zero to stimulate fast growth. The scenarios are fun but the age of this game does show however. There are little hurdles to jump like power plants exploding every 50 years but once you learn to look out for such events, if you react to problems accordingly there's not much that can really go wrong. The bigger your city, the faster it grows, the more money it'll recoup and faster. When you start you'll probably feel like you are restricted by money and that you should budget accordingly, building small and sensibly but the opposite ends up being more viable, building big, quick and probably taking out loans to accomplish those goals faster. ![]() The game basically becomes about watching the RCI bars and zoning accordingly. This is one of the biggest problems I find with the game, that once the veneer of complexion rubs off, it's actually a lot shallower than it first appears. There's a lot of interesting yet basic simulation here and it may take a little while to understand but once you do you'll realise actually how simple it all really is. ![]() I played the sandbox enough to get a good feel for the mechanics before turning my attention to the scenarios which provided me with much more structure and confinement and focused challenge. review- I actually enjoyed this game quite a bit, but I have a problem really finding extended value in sandbox games since the self set goals tend to feel very arbitrary to me. Maybe more maybe less, like I said, it was tough to reach a good estimate. I made a handful of these to learn the game then proceeded to complete the game's 18 scenarios, those, depending on your luck and skill will take you ~15 - 35 hours maybe. Playing Free Mode with no real aim, generating new cities and terrains could easily consume hundreds of hours. Time investment will vary greatly however depending on how you approach the game. Not submitting a time since I tracked it poorly and could not derive an accurate estimate.
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