SimCity: Complete Edition (PC)
In 2013, Electronic Arts released SimCity only to receive an enormous backlash from fans of the city-building series. This wasn’t just quibbling about how the latest entry differed from previous titles in the SimCity franchise though, people were outraged because the game was often literally unplayable. The game demanded a persistent internet collection for a multiplayer feature that not everyone was interested in using and EA’s servers immediately faced issues and were rarely up. People couldn’t play the game they bought, and even after server issues were sorted, the requirement you always be connected to the internet still lead to bugs and bad performance. Eventually, SimCity would see an update remove the online requirement so people could build in single player regardless of how EA’s servers were doing, and with the 2014 rerelease SimCity: Complete Edition, they made sure to mention at the very top of its list of features that you can play offline. SimCity: Complete Edition ends up being exactly what its name proclaims then, an easily played version of the citybuilder without any unnecessary connectivity as well as the extra downloadable content included that had been sold separately before. It’s claim it’s two games in one feels like a lie since SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow is an expansion and not a standalone game, but otherwise, SimCity can finally be judged more on the merits of what its gameplay provides rather than the controversy EA caused on release.
SimCity: Complete Edition is a city management game through and through, the only goal really being to help your city prosper and grow. To get started, first you’ll need to choose an empty plot of land, there being some terrain consideration since you can’t really edit it afterward, so you can essentially choose if you want things to be harder if you pick an area with less workable space like a mountainous area or an island. Technically though, you are picking to be part of a grander region, each region having a few available spaces to build a city in line with the initial idea behind this game being that other players can build their cities in the same region as you so you can trade or provide services to each other so that your city didn’t feel so isolated. Even if you elect to play alone though, you can make use of these regional relationships, the player instead able to create many different towns you can then have cooperate in different ways like providing benefits through specializations in industries such as manufacturing or tourism. Neighboring cities can even develop wonders together like an international airport or space shuttle launching pad that can feel like a sort of end goal thanks to the otherwise massive monetary and resource demands.
The idea behind developing a region cooperatively or as one person managing many towns does have potential, especially since you can have it where cities essentially freeze in a stable state so you can bounce between cities without worrying what might happen to one while you’re gone. However, it feels like some efforts to accommodate cities interacting lead to certain limitations. In SimCity: Complete Edition that plot of land you claim can feel rather restrictive. There is only so much space to build your town so you can’t exactly build some sort of sprawling self-sufficient metropolis. In fact, your city, even with smart investments and good planning, will have to make compromises simply because the borders are hard limits. If you want to place something like an airport or amusement park, you’ll sacrifice a great deal of land while your citizens will likely still be demanding more homes or businesses. You can try to cater towards a specific city concept like a town based around coal mining or gambling, but your growth still feels locked in by borders that do eventually limit how you can expand your city. Funnily enough, while this is likely to encourage reliance on other cities in the region, it also leads to the more unique form of solo play where you’re less focused on a single city and more on the entire region. It’s much easier to justify giant city dumps or dedicating large areas to a university and academy when you can have things move between your managed cities, and while getting cities out of their early days might feel a little repetitive, working on a range of mutually beneficial but different cities does save the game from losing your interest once you’ve covered all the ground available to a city.
When it comes to city development, there are a range of necessities and systems to keep in mind. Many of them are what you’d expect from a modern urban area: electricity, plumbing, and infrastructure. Quite nicely, all three of these are connected in SimCity: Complete Edition, the player’s placement of roads also inherently providing power and water to any building along the street. This connectivity does remove potential spacing concerns that could have come through power lines and thankfully the pipe system won’t really clog up unless you fail to build a way to handle the sewage, so instead you’re more free to focus on bigger concerns. To help build up your city, you’ll need to designate residential, commercial, and industrial zones, people needing places to live, shop, and work if you want your city to lure in new citizens. While you can mark the zones dedicated to these purposes, it will be up to the people who move into your city to actually build them, a range of factors determining what they’ll choose to build and if it manages to stay occupied. If you want richer citizens, you need to make the area nicer by keeping pollutants far away and building public works like parks. If you want to pack more people into spaces with things like apartments, you’ll need to mark residential zones along the more expensive roads with higher capacities for traffic. If the roads make it hard to reach commercial zones, shops might close, and if there aren’t enough factories to work at, people might move out of town.
SimCity: Complete Edition is about the delicate balancing act of your people’s demands, the available building space, and your cash inflow. You start off with a decent amount of money to start the early building, and as people move in and begin paying taxes, you can start improving your city. While sometimes citizens might make special requests or provide cash rewards for being able to achieve things like collecting the city’s garbage well or preventing fires from getting out of control, you’ll most rely on your populace to directly contribute to your coffers and managing taxes ends up an important part of city creation too. Once you can afford them, things like hospitals, schools, police departments, and many other services can increase the land value in your town and keep people happy, and while this can sound like a lot to manage, there are actually very few necessary services in total and you’re often free to adjust the city’s layout as you like by bulldozing old places to make room for new ones. There’s a nice flow to starting a city, going from trying to get people to come without bankrupting yourself to slowly bringing in new niceties to having the kind of money necessary to pursue larger projects and better alternatives like more efficient and clean burning power plants. Working up to universities let you invest in researching more useful building types, and you can even begin to build sport stadiums and docks for ferries, a town that was once mostly just clusters of necessary homes and workplaces becoming something with more direction and uniqueness.
The player is able to adjust the speed the game moves at whenever they wish, meaning you can pause things if you need to do deep customization or maybe turn it up to cheetah speed when you need a big surge of taxes to help your next project. There are a lot of charts and special view modes to help you make more informed choices to help optimize and improve your city. You can even start improving certain individual buildings like adding more ambulance bays to a clinic or classrooms to your schools, this sometimes making up for the cramped maps since you can make something more efficient rather than just plopping down more instances of that building type. Some of the included digital content packs allow you to even place real world landmarks like the Eiffel Tower in your city, others can give you themed alternatives like French police stations, but the Hero and Villains Pack feels like a weak way to inject superhero missions into a city building game so it might not be worth the investment. On the other hand, the elements from the Cities of Tomorrow expansion can be very interesting. Not only does it add a range of building alternatives for areas like park that will cause nearby buildings to take on futuristic appearances, but you can tap into new technologies through an advanced Academy like wave generators or even build up some MegaTowers. Playing into SimCity: Complete Edition’s necessity to build upward instead of outward, MegaTowers have you build each floor one by one, able to pick things like a huge residential block, a giant mall, or services like a learning floor or garbage treatment area. While you’ll be able to get many skyscrapers if you manage your city’s density and value already, MegaTowers can still loom even larger over a city, and you can build multiple, allowing you to chase the higher population counts more easily than if you were always locked in by the amount of available land.
Even with ideas like the MegaTower and regional cooperation though, SimCity: Complete Edition can still feel like it makes building up a massive city a short affair. You do need to work hard, adjust, and have a good understanding of the systems at play to build up to a truly efficient and profitable civilization, but since you can’t keep growing outward, the inward focus on trying to micromanage what space there is to be a bit better does make the longevity suffer a touch. This is one reason why a single player managing a whole region is likely the better approach than having one city alongside a group of other players in the same area. Once you feel your city couldn’t grow much more without dismantling and making minor improvements here and there, it can now become a source of useful services for another city you can take in a new direction. If you’re feeling a bit morbid though, you can unleash disasters upon your town to spice things up, although they seem like they might have been made a touch kinder than in previous games to account for the original idea your city would always be running in the background on a server. When my city was visited by aliens, their UFO just abducted people from a single shop. When a tornado tore across the roads, airport, and casino, none needed repairs. Even a meteor shower was quickly swept up when the few impacted buildings were easily replaced, although if perhaps luck had lead to things hitting the MegaTowers instead they’d have truly felt disastrous.
THE VERDICT: SimCity: Complete Edition may not be burdened by an omnipresent need for internet connectivity like its original release, but design ideas around cooperative multiplayer end up being a blessing and a curse. The towns you build definitely involve a satisfying degree of thought and management, a successful civilization requiring good balancing of the books and a willingness to adjust to the demands of your people. On the other hand, it feels like you’re locked in heavily by your borders, this meaning individual cities reach their peak a bit earlier. However, the option to cultivate an entire region of cities is quite captivating, specialization making up for limited building room as you are pushed towards making cities with stronger creative directions and clear purposes.
And so, I give SimCity: Complete Edition for PC…
A GOOD rating. The SimCity name might be weighing a little heavily on the entry here, and not just because of its initial controversies. SimCity: Complete Edition almost feels like it should have leaned even more into the idea of working on one big region, it likely easier to swallow the fact your towns won’t reach the size of New York City if their grander purpose is put forth more clearly. The game doesn’t hide its desire for you to specialize of course, and it does feel like the borders could still afford to be pushed at some point if you perhaps hit a certain metric like population size. However, the game does add some value beyond getting a city to a highly successful state because of its relationship with other settlements. You can’t make an all-purpose city and as a result start to lean into design choices that make your cities more unique, and even more options or leniency when it came to building up or improving what you have could have continued to make developing your smaller but more unique towns feel purposeful. As it is things do feel sanded down a touch to make everything work. Your people can’t have it all so cities that really should logically have something like an airport must do without, the canvas for creative and intelligent city building tight but not to the point it detracts from the enjoyment at least. You’ll wish for more without it being unreasonable and there are at least late game goals like the Great Works or MegaTowers so cities don’t end up feeling “complete” or disposable. Still, regional relations could have been expanded too if they were to be the game’s broader focus, deeper connections beyond resource and service sharing a way to bump things up further if the cities can’t be expanded.
The building systems, the gradual growth into a flourishing city, and the eventual utility each place you’ve made contributes to the wider region means SimCity: Complete Edition is able to provide a layered and engrossing city management experience, but it feels like everything could have been taken further. With less focus on server maintenance and more on its robust systems, EA and Maxis could have pushed it even closer to realistic relations between neighboring cities or opened up the opportunity to really build a bustling metropolis. The game at least does both ideas well enough that it’s easy to get sucked in for long productive sessions where you’ll always thinking about what to do next, so despite its rocky history that can’t be ignored, SimCity 2013 at least ended up not just playable but entertaining to boot.