Rooksville is, I hope, a nice place to live. My time spent nurturing the place from a stinking backwater hellhole into a diverse temperate urban haven has always been far from trouble free, as is the creation of every city in Deep Silver’s new Sim City-alike City Life. But now the balance of cultural groups is right, and the businesses are up, it may be that the city has a chance to flourish.
Perhaps surprisingly, there hasn’t been a huge wave of city-building games released in recent years, with the exception of titles like the very recent Tycoon City: New York and a few years back, the fourth iteration in the legendary Sim City series that arguably, started the whole thing off. Certainly, the idea of using a game to build one’s own city from the ground up and shape it as the player sees fit is an attractive one, if a difficult one to pull off well. Deep Silver and Monte Christo have decided to give it a go this year however, with the release of this game. It’s a simple principle that ultimately becomes satisfyingly complex. To begin with, all you have is your compulsory City Hall, the core structure around which your entire urban conurbation is centred, but later on you’ll have access to, amongst many others, huge tower blocks, drive-ins, cinemas, and the developers’ own comedy addition – the games studio. (Clearly the pillar of urban society, ho ho!)
There are several environments to choose from, including mountainous valleys, bright tropical beaches, temperate lands, and so on. Each has its advantages and disadvantages in game terms, from the pros and cons of having an armed-to-the-teeth aircraft carrier on nearby shores to the natural beauty of the local peaks. Each of the environments has five or six enormous plots of land that can be purchased for building purposes, if you have the huge sums of cash necessary. Cash, of course, is one of your main priorities in a city-building game, and City Life doesn’t buck the trend. Businesses must be sensitively planned and constructed in the areas where they will have the most favourable economic impact, and as with everything, businesses and leisure facilities must suit those cultural groups, lest factories go unused and riots spread to the streets, forcing SWAT teams to intervene.
Once the early difficulties of maximising cash flow and satisfying cultural groups are largely under the thumb, the truly ambitious construction can begin. As time goes on, your prestigious City Hall is periodically upgraded in size and splendour, and with it the impressiveness of the structures and businesses you can create. After a while, you gain access to marinas, airports, high-quality schools and hospitals, SWAT HQs, and the beautiful skyscrapers that inevitably grace much of the space available on City Life’s box.
CL is a fully 3D title with an array of fairly pleasing visuals. Provided you have the rig for the job, there are gorgeous watery reflections and refractions, flashing lights at night (there are four times of day in which to play) and sparkling beaches. What really impressed me were the water effects and in particular, one truly lovely moment: I was zooming around the grimy streets of the local slum, (During Rooksville’s harder early days, naturally) and in between the cars and trucks, I spotted what looked at first like a horribly mutated man, when in fact it turned out to be a middle-aged father, his young daughter smiling happily as she bobbed along, carried on his shoulders. The sight surprised me and really made me smile, defiantly a world away from the gib-splattered carnage of much of the 21st Century’s PC gaming, a tender moment of father-and-daughter in the hustle and bustle of a towering city.
For me, it’s these little moments, when you can zoom right in and forget for a moment about your lofty Godlike perspective and see what it’s like for the little people, that City Life’s inherent charm comes through. It’s the simple satisfaction of watching your fledgling urban squall grow from nothing to an all-consuming metropolis. But it’s also the smile on a little girl’s face. City and Life. This is a game that does what it says on the tin.
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