No highways, trains, ports, or airstrips. Streets, dirt roads, buses, and subways - that's it. There are precious few transportation options. View image here: - I don't recall if the old games were like this, but I can barely see to build anything at night.įinally, I know this isn't supposed to be SimCity 5, but I can't help but think about how much is missing from the earlier games that could have worked very well in Societies: You can rotate the buildings 45 degrees at a time, which is cool, but you can't have diagonal roads, so it's not as useful as it could be. Big cities still start to look a little repetitive, but not as bad as in the old games. There is a pretty decent variety of buildings available. I didn't notice any significant crash in performance at 10,000 population either as mentioned above. And it runs well enough on my machine at 1680x1050 (C2D 6400/2GB ram/7900GS). Nothing mind blowing, but they don't have to be. In the old games I basically used Landmarks to do somewhat the same thing, so I'm liking this aspect of Societies.

I like being able to stuff everything in tight in a downtown situation and spread out the houses and buildings in rural areas.

It allows you to decide precisely how you want your city to look, which is pretty cool. I actually enjoy the main design decision behind Societies: Placing individual buildings instead of zoning specified areas as in the other games. I moved on to a oppressive communist regime which also looked cool while being completely different from my first effort. I started with a small town with farm houses and a main street area downtown, which turned out looking very cool. I like the ability to 'theme' your city.

But there are a lot of baffling issues/omissions, so I can see why it's earning the low scores.

Simcity 4 rotate building