It's a fun game until you understand the mechanics behind it. Things like the inflated population, terrible AI on most services, and traffic problems make advancement in the game close to impossible. The clogging of your streets that happen as your sims advance is a major issue. The streets become so clogged that the upgrading buildings come to a stand still and so does your income/population.

I still play the game at times ... sadly not as much as i did when it first came out. updates to the game have fixed some issue's, but many more kinks still need to be worked out as future updates come out.

A very disappointing game, especially as the next title in the Simcity series. It is at first charming and intriguing, but the more you know about what's going on under the cheery facade the less likeable it becomes. Civilians and car traffic are calculated exactly as the city's utilities: they are brainless entities which go where a worker is needed to fill a job and a person is needed to fill a home. You can check out Youtube videos where a person has put one empty house at the end of a long street, or one business with job vacancies, and hordes of cars rush for the single building, and when the vacancy is filled, they all turn around. The same thing occurs when you place a zone which begins constructing a building. Vast amounts of construction trucks and moving vans enter your city and cause huge traffic jams, and when the one van and truck the building needs arrive at the site, all the rest turn around and leave, causing hideous traffic issues pointlessly.

The game's much vaunted Glassbox engine is at the heart of these problems, giving it an outward appearance of complexity and thought when in reality the game lacks both. Cars will use nearby dirt roads if they're closer than four lane avenues, backing up traffic endlessly until you upgrade the dirt road because they're that stupid. Fire engines will stack up on a single burning building because it's the closest, while other fires burn in the city. Garbage trucks will sometimes be eight in a row on a single street, all competing for the same garbage cans because they're the closest, playing leapfrog with one another in the height of inefficiency. Worse, testing has shown much of the game is flat artificial and arbitrary. Some players have created all residential cities, with no commercial or industrial zones in the entire region (no jobs), yet somehow the residential zones, given enough time, eventually turn into skyscrapers which produce vast amounts of wealth, even though the people inside shouldn't be making anything at all.

Look this game up before you play it, check out Youtube to get an idea of how very broken, how very false it is to its core. This is barely even SimTown, which was far more complex and better constructed than this 'game,' which seems to thwart the idea what the player does has any consequence by allowing cities and businesses to grow independent of his or her actions. This game was nowhere near ready to be released as it lacks basic, core functionality, and as explained by people who have looked inside the game's code and network traffic, not even the always online requirement is justifiable, as the multiplayer metagame is as artificial as everything else.

Criminals can cross the border of one city into another? Wrong. When a player is offline, their city turns dormant, locked perpetually in whatever state it was in when he or she last played. If your city is near a high crime city, criminals will not cross the border, criminals will simply be spawned in your city to imitate the effect, often leading to murderers and high level criminals appearing on your streets even though your neighbor's criminals aren't nearly that out of hand. Simcity is 20% functionality, 80% imitation of functionality. It basically lies to you constantly, and it's exactly as fun as that sounds, especially if you're looking for the next game in the SimCity series.

Great expectations, but not so good game as I wanted to play. This game had great potential, but first of all it needs real full single player, not such quasi-multiplayer. Maps are tiny. There is no chance to build some kind of megapolis. Pressure to cooperation between players is to big and it affects to basic game mechanics. Without Great Works there is always problem with fulfilling all vacant jobs. Global market not always works fine which causes financial problems. Tourism is for me still big mistery - I tried almost all advices about it and I had no idea what is going wrong.

I suppose, SimCity with few upgrades will be really good game, but now... no, it's not as good as should be. Pressure to made this game as multiplayer destroyed most of it's advantages.

alright i played this game for 3 days and didn't get it at release so the servers are all right and i must say i only payed 10 dollars because i had promo codes and gifts so this is my review its a good game, here are some good things that i loved in this game, it looks beautiful the cars and people walking around makes it feel alive the sounds are fantastic but i have run into some audio glitches but going out and going back in helps with that problem. the disasters as always look amazing and are entertaining to watch but for how much work i put into my city or town really i feel bad and wish i had some military support to take out the lizard and aliens. but at times i can see how the bad out ways the good on this game just like the online issues at launch that really did hurt this game thanks alot EA you really need to fix your issues. and the space is so horrible i feel this like a town with big buildings, i run out of space so quick that after a while i just cant make any more money and am force to either take out bonds which dont help or raise taxes and have all my people leave. sure it makes it more challenging but there is so much i want to do and i lose money to fast to get there. but all together i disagree with people giving this a 1 or a 2 star because when you get online and believe me you can get online now every one left :) its a great game. the space should be fixed or looked at its fun and exciting is it worth a full purchase? NO it is not its at least 40 dollars or 30. if you can get it at 20 oh ya its worth it but all together i personally would give it a 4 star rating but for now i will settle for 3 star EA broke it from launch and it is a shame that they did. but dont be hard on this game because of EA lighten up on it if you play it you will have a blast it will consume you and give you a challenge. just wish that they put more effort into it just like more space to build :/

EXTRAORDINARY! If you're expecting a 3D version of SimCity 4 you're going to give this SimCity a low score. Aside from the launch server issues, which have for the most part been resolved and the always online DRM, inside this latest iteration of SimCity is a huge, intersting, fun and highly addictive game.

A metropolis designer it is not. It is not so much a city simulator like SC4 of CitiesXL, both of which allow you to build huge, million plus pseudo-populations, SC5 is a CITY builder and MANAGER that allows you toi build mid-sized, thousands of REAL populations, not pseudo simulated populations.

WHAT I DON'T LIKE:

INFLATED POPULATION NUMBERS: Pay no attention to the population number, it's a lie. Why did EA multiply the true population count is beyond me, accept to give the ILLUSION that there are more people in your city than there actually are. It's more of an annoyance than anything else. To see the true population just look at your workers stat and totally disregard EA's lying number.

TRAFFIC JAMS: Due to bad pathing vehicles go from point A to point B using the shortest calculated route, but do not factor in the current traffic congestion and as such, rather than taking an alternative route, contribute to the current congestion by taking the same route. This is, according to EA, a temporary problem that they are now addressing, whereby the vehicles will also consider traffic congestion and plan an alternate route accordingly. Still waiting for this promised patch.

FIRE TRUCKS: Currently, fire trucks all converge on the same fire, even if there are several fires in the city rather than sending one fire truck to each fire. The result is in major disasters that you'll lose several buildings. This I hope to see a patch for in the near future.

NO FARMS AND FOOD INDUSTRIES: Come on. What a simple addition to add food industries and farms. However, I'll give EA a temporary pass on this, as this is the first iteration of this version of SimCity, and just like SC4, the good stuff came after the original, anemic version was released.

THINGS I LIKE:

- Access to several regions that actually share resources and city services.

- Industries that have true meaning to the economy and needs of the city and region.

- Event venues that can actually be used to stage money making events like rock concerts for the city. This is actually a very real feature. I live in a city that throws events to earn revenue for the city.

- Unlike SC4 and CitiesXL, SC5's cities, though not as huge, feel ALIVE with people actually going places and doing something. In SC4 and CitiesXL they only showed an animated representation of people and traffic. In SC5 it's WYSIWYG with no artificial animated represnetations.

- Animated services and industries that actually represent goods produced and services rendered, much like in Tropico and the Anno series.

IN CLOSING:

While this is certainly not a metropolis builder, who actually has a computer fast enough to calculate all of the things being calculated in SC5? It would take a CRAY supercomputer to create a metropolis of millions of population and each one being individually being calculated. The trade off is a very deep and engrossing game that you can build mid-sized cities that actually gives you a true simulation instead of SC4 and CitiesXL's pseudo simulation.

WHAT I'D LIKE TO SEE IN FUTURE PATCHES AND DLC:

Monorails and subways, highways that can connect to the main highway (freeways), bus stops and streetcar stops that actually have a sequence in their stops rather than the current random stops now.

Game is definitely enjoyable to play. Too many limitations however from the previous titles. Not enough space to expand, buggy trade systems, not to mention the always-online requirement and server issues. I wish I had waited to buy this after a price drop. Not worth the full release price in my opinion. The game will still suck some time from you though.

Very disappointed. I wanna build a metropolis like simcity 4, but in this one you can only build a simtown.

The game has great gameplay mechanics...for the most part, however, you are forced to play online. This means that you quite literally cannot play unless you have an active connection.

Also, the city sizes are all uniform. They are something close to what a medium city in SC4 would be. You will find yourself running out of room very...very fast. I truly hope they address this in the future and add megacity sizes.

The game requires that you mutliplayer, which is awful. The maps are incredibly small, the maps were much much bigger in the old ones. The server issued, although sometimes expected a little, woulld not be an isssue if you cold just player the game not multiplayer, and just sign in via internet like all steam, etc. games. There are tons of single player with oneline mutliplayer mixed that are great. This games fails horrribly on all aspects. As far as gameplay itself, clunk and no room to build

First of all i just want to say this game is a lot of fun with a lot of new ideas and features for a sim city game. But as of now it is very hard to get into any of the servers keep in mind this is 5-6 days after release. Also the region gifting system is bugged if you try to send money to a friend it vanishes and the same goes for great project. On another note the in game car path finding is a joke I have watched fire trucks trying to respond to a fire pull 5 u turns on the same street and the building burns down before they even get there/ I suggest stay away from the game until the servers are more stable and some patches get put into the the system.

Lorehead's review of the gameplay appears pretty accurate, so I will refer readers looking for a detailed analysis to his review entitled "Better, not Bigger". However, I feel someone should warn fellow GamersGate purchasers about the problems with the product. I will share my own experience, which, based on the comments and information on the support forums, seems to be fairly typical.

I pre-ordered the game through GamersGate. I downloaded it on its release date of March 5, and played normally for a couple of hours before work, completing the mandatory tutorial and beginning work on a city. When I returned home, I attempted to play again, only to find that my city was erased. You see, it is impossible to save locally on your own device. All saves occur automatically on the EA servers. So, I began a new city, only to be kicked out of the game when EA's servers crashed about 10 minutes later. You see, there is no offline mode. If you lose connection with the EA server for any reason, the game immediately shuts down. EA reported that it was performing maintenance on the server I had been using, but that was ok, because I knew from reading the forums that I could simply log on to another server, because saved games can be accessed on any server worldwide. What they did not say was that the mandatory tutorial must be repeated each time you log in to a different server. So, I completed the tutorial on the new server, and, lo and behold, there was no record of my having begun either saved city. So, I once again started from scratch, only to be kicked off when the server crashed for no particular reason other than either the (hopefully) lack of preparedness or (perhaps) simple incompetence of the folks at EA. With that, I gave up for the day. This process has repeated itself with minor variations over the last 4 days. My origin account claims that I have played the game for 11 hours. Only 2-3 hours of that was spent actually playing. The rest was wrestling with the servers.

Now, as the title said, this game does show a lot of potential. I look forward to playing it when the bugs are worked out (assuming they are). However, I would NOT recommend that anyone buy this game until they can confirm that the problems have been resolved. At the moment, I feel like I wasted my money.

The game itself is GREAT FUN! Granted getting into the game in the first place is probably going to take longer than playing the game itself. Bought the game yesterday and spent about 3 hours trying to log in and load my city without DC'ing. Got in twice and had a blast! Hopefully EA can fix the server problem really soon. I heard news that the server are now more responsive after the fix that EA pushed out. Going to try it out tonight and fingers crossed. :)

First, you should know what you’re getting. This is an online-only game, and buying it here will just get you an activation code for EA’s Origin service. That does force some annoying restrictions on gameplay that make sense in competitive multiplayer, but when you’re playing casually by yourself, just limit you. For example, there are no local saves because savescumming would be cheating.

The maps feel pretty small (Bigger ones might be coming later), similar in size to Tropico 3, but something about the fact that, in Tropico, you were playing an island nation felt less arbitrary than having a white dashed line, with green grass just beyond that you can’t build on. The devs have said that they’re the same as a medium map in SimCity 4, but the roads and buildings feel bigger, and so the city feels more cramped. You can’t terraform.

So, to enjoy this game, you’ll have to treat the need to specialize and find space as part of the challenge. No one city will be able to do everything, and this is an online game where you’ll have to interact with your neighbors. Be careful whom you invite in, since you really have no way to deal with a jerk in your region other than leaving it yourself, and anyone who joins has the same powers over it that you do, including the power to invite more people. I really do not recommend making a public region; keep it private, and invite those you trust.

Building what you want is not tremendously difficult (in that, if you maintain a surplus and wait, you will eventually be able to afford whatever it is you want to do next) but you’ll have some real choices to make about where to put things and how to connect them. Most of all, you’ll need to decide what your priorities for this city will be, and be prepared to adjust them to what your neighbors and the global market do.

I’ve played a lot of city-builders in the ten years since SimCity 4 came out, and I love the dynamism of my cities in this one. Things happen, organically, because of how the individual sims try to go about their daily lives as well as the city you’ve built them allows. You can’t paint “housing for elites” or “high-tech industry” in this one; you have to create the conditions for it to appear. Then, you have to maintain them as the city grows, resources run out, the world around it changes, and disaster strikes. Your city will actually surprise you. Come on, it’ll be fun!