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Back In Time is a sporadically updated feature in which we take a look at games of yester-years to see how well they perform against the blockbusters of today. We also see how today’s advancements could be used to benefit the title and importantly if it’s still worth picking up. This time we are taking a look at Maxis’ classic metropolis builder SimCity 4.

It’s weird to think back to the core SimCity franchise as we seem experiencing a bit of a drought. We’ve seen it on the DS and we’ve seen it as a casual game on the Wii but we haven’t seen a fully featured version of the city builder, unless you count the poorly received SimCity Societies, for nearly five years. The last one we saw was the aptly named SimCity 4.

The core of the franchise in that you build a city from a small village to a buzzing metropolis was still there albeit with some improvements. SimCity 4 allowed for prospective majors to use terraforming tools, share cities online, import characters from popular game The Sims, play through day and night cycles and most importantly have an entire region in which you can network up your cities.

You are initially greeted to a global view of your region and then you get to pick a square in which to start building up your new community. With online as important as it is today it would have been interesting to see in the region view as the entire world with the map being populated with other users cities. Essentially turning SimCity into an MMO but with the core game still being a single player experience. I found that throughout the building of my first city I had no other sources of income due to a lack of deals with the non-existent neighboring cities. This would stop that happening and it would also give a great sense of scale while looking at the region populated by other people.

With hindsight it would make sense to take out the whole import-your-sims mode. It was a nice idea to put your sims from The Sims into this game but it didn’t amount to much gameplay wise except for having someone to follow. Maybe a bit more time should have been spent on this mode, making it a bit more worthwhile.

Reading back on reviews at the time the main complaint seemed to be that the game was to hard. Although I agree that managing your budget so you actually make a profit is a challenge at first, once you get to grips with how to run a city it’s actually quite easy. The real complaint should made about the ticker system. You would often get complaints about how there is no fire protection or police support despite the fact that your city is only a couple of hundred strong. It’s not really necessary despite the game making you feel like you shouldn’t go without.

Graphically the game surprisingly looks great due to the isometric view point. The lack of 3D really helps the aging of SimCity 4 as despite a few graphical hitches and disappearing cars the visuals help sell what is a good representation of a city. The audio isn’t bad either and the addition of custom soundtracks makes it’s welcome support.

It’s quite weird looking back on how well the game holds up by today’s standards. I wouldn’t buy this solely as an integration with your characters from The Sims although as a standalone game SimCity 4 is great. Sure it doesn’t have brilliant three dimensional viewpoints for you to enjoy but the simplicity and visual presentation of SimCity 4 really backs up what is a great game to play even by today’s standards.

Verdict: Thumbs Up