The older Sim Cities and all their iterations are pretty good, enjoyed City Life and most of it's iterations... (although the lack of multi-threading kills the newer versions). Of course there is Tropico, which is a great little series as well.
As far as Sim City...
Played the beta/demo, thought it looked great, wanted to really like it... but I found it a little lacking in some areas. It is a "new" I.P. that is wrapped in an old and familiar wrapper.
Reminded me a lot of how X-Com (and some other games) have been rebooted or re-imagined. It isn't "bad" on it's own terms but it isn't exactly what I look for in a modern PC builder style game.
I found it crippled in scope, apparently to lower the PC requirement gate. Smaller city sizes is a big turn off, coupled with no SLi support out of the box... (had to manage that external the game). The demo was stable but I hear the release not so much.
If you can run it maxed with good frames it is a pretty attractive game.
I find the multi-player interesting in the same way as I do the new Total War series multiplayer... It's cute, and would of been a "nice to have" addition, to a single player game with a coherent A.I.
Yes you can play single player, but much like the previous Sim City (not counting societies which is garbage), there is no discernible difficulty in such a project. This means that there are very optimized paths to "victory" if you want to call it that.
In that, there is little in the way of challenge/accomplishment contrast, which makes it a little boring as a composition. Maybe if you played with all assholes there could be some challenge? Unfortunately, like yourself, not really in a position to sit around and work out when me and mine are going to "raid" Sim City.
Essentially in that scenario one would imagine some sort of population or cash cap for teams... or something to give a "win" state, and provide some game tension... and I didn't see that (or think that is even possible outside of a server wide meta competition as with a lot of micro trans games).
Ultimately I am a little confused as to who this game is actually for. It is a little too casual, a little too "online", a little too "friendly", to meet my "game hobby" needs.
It comes off as a paint brush tool-set which is time gated to a "money" stat. Like I said, it is a very friendly game, everything about it smacks of a friendliness, for me it crosses a line between "user friendly", and "Mr. Rodgers".
For what it is worth... I would buy it once they slash the price, but that is a concern simply because EA could just as well turn off the servers... and you are buying nothing.
Shrug... pass for me.
