Cityscapes: Sim Builder

There’s never been another version of SimCity since the first one (in the early ‘90s), nor any similar game, that has felt like a proper city builder to me. Finally, here’s a game that takes that original concept and improves on it without destroying it. The essential game is just about maintaining the balance between residential, commercial, and industrial zones. Sound easy? It’s not. Every zone you place is constantly changing, within itself and in response to changes in the environment. The result is the ultimate flow game - engrossing, challenging, creative. You can set yourself little side goals - making your city beautiful, or making sure every citizen has access to education, or (yeah, I see you) spreading as much misery as possible. But if you aren’t paying attention to how the 3 big numbers - citizens, shoppers, and workers - fit in with your plans, nothing else is going to work the way that you want it to. There are some bugs at this time that I would like to see fixed. In particular, I prefer to play exclusively with a game controller and they’ve got a ways to go with that. Trying to remember whether it’s B or RT to close a window has been major breaking point in aforementioned flow. (It should always be B for consistency with other games.) But only say things like that because I care. :-)

I subscribed to Arcade assuming Cityscapes was a more affordable option to Sim City Build-it which requires obscene amounts of funds from users seeking to acquire unique buildings and landscaping. After playing, it is clear Cityscapes has a long way to go. :( Build-it offers much better looking buildings and 3d renderings of your city and generally allows users to play at their own pace for regular buildings. Both games require busy work. Buildit requires users to manufacture items to earn funds to build and perform tasks for keys, but the user gets to determine the pace and layout with minimal limitations. In contrast, I found Cityscapes bewildering and unintuitive with its constant annoying notifications requiring the user to build and upgrade homes, schools, stores, manufacturers, utilities, etc. I felt like a lemming following one order after another without the opportunity to evaluate progress at my own pace and modify the layout as I wish with clearly set parameters. Build-it indicates how much utilities and services are required beforehand so I can design without being pestered by notifications. I genuinely hope Arcade will eventually offer a proper Build-it dupe - with better caliber graphics, clear notice of build requirements, offers users more control over the final look without constant in-game pestering. Clearly, there is a huge market of Build-it players tired of getting gauged by EA like me that will gladly even pay a reasonable amount for a genuine dupe.

I really love this game. I was just about to cancel my Apple Arcade subscription when I found this new releases game, but now I decided to renew my subscription. I’ve been hoping to have this kind of game on iPad for a long time. If you ask me, I’d seen it’s much more fun than mobile sim city build it. Thank you very much, the develop team! However, there are a few bugs, and I really need these to be fixed. First of all, this game depends to much on the citizen satisfaction policy, I get to do whatever they want immediately, build or upgrade a building, etc, to bring up the number. For no good reason, they are not satisfied when they don’t get a job immediately, and this lowered the number. I mean, even in the real world, not everyone can get a job. Besides, some people are loaded, and they don’t need a job! I’m here to have fun, but these citizens are mean and easily outraged. Please slow down! Secondly, some tasks required me to bring up the education supply or decrease the pollution level, but building new schools and gardens doesn’t work. Thirdly, I don’t understand the “increase the commuters number” task. What do I do? I never succeed in accomplishing this task. If you want me to build new houses or bus stops, please just say it. Buy the way, it doesn’t work. Fourthly, at level 79, I still can’t expand my territory to the seashore, why? Fifthly, there are a lot of green arrows upon my buildings, but the system doesn’t allow me to merge the buildings because I don’t have enough buildings at their highest level. Please give a detailed illustration on the merge policy or remove the green arrows, they are annoying.