Review: SimCity 3000 Unlimited

SimCity 3000 is another iteration in the well known Sim City series, and should be a familiar game to many people. The game is an open ended city simulation, and the player takes up the role of the mayor of the city, given the power to build transport links, city services such as police, power and water supplies, and other infrastructure items, with the aim to convince industry, commerce and residents to live in the city.

The main menu with its floaty choices

The game is simple to get started - all you need is a road, a set of three zones and some power, and voila, buildings will begin to be built. The manual has a simple tutorial section which is good both for people that are new to the task before them, as well as for players of SimCity 2000 who need to get an idea of how to do things with the new user interface.

The game features many ways to start a city, you can enter a blank terrain editor where you can build hills and lakes for your city to be built around, or you can use a "starter town" where there is a small amount of infrastructre in place, and it's up to you to continue from the groundwork already done. There are also a selection of prebuilt cities to give you an idea what can happen, and a set of scenarios where you have a specific objective, ranging from cleaning up a polluted town to putting out the great fire of London.

The terrain editor allows the creation of a variety of terrains before you build your city

Ultimately, the game is much the same as SimCity 2000. There's not much missing - some structures are different or gone (the Arcologies are not there), and the annoying newspapers are replaced with a news ticker. Most of the changes are useful extras - the subways are now seaparate from the water system, so it's finally possible to build a good subway system without getting confused. The graphics have had a useful update, for instance there are several different terrains instead of the plain brown that was ground in 2000. The transport system has been greatly updated, and you can build a town entirely without roads, since buildings will build around subway and train stations. Suffice to say that this, at least to the extent of the gameplay, is a great improvement on 2000 - Maxis have hardly been idle between the two games!

The subway system is much improved from Simcity 2000

However, the game suffers badly from one thing. It is very, very slow. It's not just that the graphics are slow (of all the things Linux suffers from badly, slow 2d graphics are almost certainly the most noticable), but the whole game moves slowly - perhaps speeding up the graphics would change this, but at least working around it would make the game tolerably speedy. It's painful to have to go and make a cup of tea since you've ran out of money and you know you're not going to get enough for that police station for the next two years. Perhaps I'm just not good at the game, but it would be nice if there was a point in running at less than full-speed.

The graphics, as I've mentioned earlier, have had a useful update, and they are nice. The buildings look more detailed, and have nice little effects such as animated smoke (which you can turn off... always good to be able to turn things off). The cars still suddenly appear on roads, and then dissappear randomly, but they actually look like cars rather than the 4 blue dots that represented a car in 2000. There are less useful tweaks also - an extra zoom level that is useless for playing, but good for looking at pictures (and used to good effect in the scenarios).

Disasters include bombardment with junk from space - luckily it doesn't always hit...

An aspect of the game that will be familiar to players of the previous games is the disasters. Personally, I don't see the point in playing with random disasters more than once - once you know you can deal with them, they're just annoying - but they are still here. They are much prettier than the cheap sprite-style effects that were part of SimCity 2000, but feel more uncontrollable and certainly aren't something that I'd consider any more than a few minutes fun, for those moments when nothing short of the total destruction of your beautiful city will do...

Another side of management style games that I tend to ignore is the sound, and I'm glad I didn't expect any great surprises. It didnt help that the effects were choppy (probably due to a slow and very old sound card in my case) but the sounds are also uninspring, ranging from a repetative doorbell whenever you query a house to a constant sound of traffic. All in all, I spend enough time trying to drown out the sound of cars going by in real life that I dont really see much need to listen to it in the game, so I turned them off and thought nothing more of it. As to the music, I can't say anything about it other than that it was also choppy and as such unbearable, but more to the point my CD player (or even the radio) can provide me with far superior music anyway...

My city's looking a little more healthy now, lots of pretty buildings.

Loki have got some things very right, and the installer and update tools are good. The installation was as simple as anything... but there was one problem I needed to overcome before playing - this game has been released some time, and my system uses some later versions of core libraries which are incompatable. However, I quickly found and installed the Loki Update tool, and was greatly surprised by it's simplicity. It looked in the .loki directory, found all my Loki games and asked which I wanted to update - one mouse click (and a large download - I like ADSL...) and SimCity was up and running. Nice.

Overall, this game really does fall down over the speed issue. I can cope with playing at 15 or 20 frames per second, but when the game is slow moving also, it just makes things feel a little irritating. Should you buy this game? Well, if you've got a fast computer you might have a bit more luck than me, and if you liked SimCity 2000 then you'll like this too, and its speed wont really detract from the experience to much. Otherwise, I'd wait till you've got lots of spare cash.

This review written by mrsneeze on the 2nd of December, 2001.

Buy SimCity 3000 Unlimited for Linux from Tuxgames.

Download a demo for Linux from Loki Games

SimCity 3000 Unlimited was written by Maxis and was ported to Linux by Loki Entertainment Software