SimCity is the only Sims franchise left that has some prestige to it’s name and that’s no discredit to the others but after so many spin offs and expansions it’s hard to get excited about another rendition of The Sims. Meanwhile the larger scale SimCity trickles out games every couple of years that all meet a high level of quality and despite last years slightly dumbed down SimCity DS, SimCity Creator still has some hype behind it.
Creator allows you to play the game we all know and love on the Wii or at least a very simple emulation of that. You even get a bit more customization in how your buildings look but otherwise it’s a very toned down version of the core franchise. Obviously the full PC simulation wouldn’t work so you’ve got to commend the team for their work because Creator is highly enjoyable despite being a shell of the original.
It all starts to fall apart when you realise the control scheme in place. They’ve taken out the excellent grid alignment that featured in SimCity 4 and made it a little more freeform. Your main structures and zones are still squarely aligned but you can’t just drag out large boxes of zones any more. It gets even worse when you have roughly 32 directions of road on offer and unless you have ninja like balance your city will end up looking like a mess. The game does a great job of taking the overall feel of SimCity and putting it on the Wii but it’s let down by making the building and city planning areas of the game way to fiddly and complex.
The main mode of the game is mission mode which basically replaces scenario mode from the previous games. Nothing special here just a series of partly built city’s with objectives and time limits. Despite the fact these never get that exciting they are something to do and luckily SimCity has never really been about scenarios or missions because it’s simply building a city that sucks up all your hours.
The DS game made some highly questionable work of the advisory system and yet again that’s the case with Creator. Here they adopt MySims persona’s to tell you information on what you should be doing. The problem is that most of the time they aren’t really helping you. If they aren’t being ignored because of the loading between game and the panel it’s self, they are spouting their own horrible brand of comedy at you.
Once you finished building your metropolis you can destory it or at least the marketing would like you to. The thing is that although it’s wildly fun to do there isn’t much point to it. Anyone who has played SimCity will know what it’s like once they have saved their game to unleashed a torrent of disaters upon it. That aspect of the game is very much intact and as good as ever.
SimCity Creator is odd because it’s the first in this franchise that doesn’t quite meet the high expectations of the series. Or at least it’s not aiming for a similar experience because what we have here is an accessible and highly dumbed down version of the original with dodgy controls. It would be a lot easier to recommend the original or even the DS version over this simply due to the controls. Despite this SimCity Creator does have it’s moments and if you’re willing to triumph over the quirky controls then you’ll find something worth trying.
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