City Life 2008 Edition

Rating Teen Genre simulation Publisher Paradox Interactive External Links Official Paradox Website

Breaking up is hard to do. Breaking up a fight between the Elites and the Have Nots is harder to do, unless you happen to build a Police Station next to their neighborhood. Either that, or feel free to break down their very living quarters in hopes of building moderate-level housing and businesses that will attract more Blue Collar workers to the northern development sites of your purchased mass of land. City Life is a modern city creator brought to us by Monte Cristo, which allows the player to zoom in and view, in relative microscopic detail, the hustle and bustle of their planning. The 2008 Edition offers, on top of the other additions from previous expansions, 60 new building types and access to some famous buildings, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Royal Opera.

Start off in your citymaking enterprises by picking a suitable plot of land. Afterward, choose a site for your new Town Hall and start building residences, power sources and waste management. These three basic tools will begin to generate the income necessary to start your long-term plans. There are six different sub-cultures in City Life that must be monitored in order to assure that your lifestyle, as well as your job, is secure. You start out by attracting Fringes, Blue Collars and Have-Nots into various neighborhoods. These sub-cultures are attracted to certain places of living based on the businesses and services provided that will tend to cater to their tastes. With time, Suits and Radical Chics will begin to appear once your Blue Collars and Fringes start having access to education and better jobs with promotional advancement. The (monetary) pinnacle of your society comes in the form of Elites, the crème de la crème of your labors. Find a way to make all six of these types live in harmony while constantly developing your city structures.

Attracting a certain type of sub-culture to each neighborhood is largely dependant on the availability of services and businesses that will cater more favorably to that specific subgroup. Although a few structures will require a mixing of cultures, each group tends to stick to their like mind. Too much mixing will result in cultural tension. Tension that goes unchecked, either by law enforcement or re-zoning, will eventually result into general unrest and eventual riot. Aside from riots, the only other major disaster your city faces is the occasional fire. Unlike some of the SimCity titles, City Life focuses less on city preservation from outside forces and more on ethical cohesiveness and revenue generation. To assist in that, city revenue and population control are ridiculously simplified in relation to a simulation game. There aren’t any slider bars on taxes or much interaction with population growth. Your primary concern is what to build and where to build in order to ensure a smooth flow of both cash and country.

Although music tracks are repetitive and limited, they remain catchy and serve to assist with the enticement of playing the game. It’s less of an atmospheric setting and more of a power trip than anything. The music makes you get in the zone of city planning instead of enhancing your sandbox. Look out for some moderately high-end number crunching as far as your graphics power is concerned. Many graphics cards will not run City Life if they are not geared to support the pixel shaders that the title uses. Make sure that you have the recommended settings necessary to play. This isn’t a title where you can fudge a couple of settings in order to improve performance or even squeak by with the bare minimums. In all cases, City Life is geared toward a player who manages sim games well, though not on a severely micromanaged level.

Although there is beauty in its simplicity, City Life may not reach far beyond the sim audience. Even if its not as complex as SimCity 4 was in terms of the basic maintenances necessary to stay just above the losing column, the overall package offers little direction for first-time or dabbling simmers. The tutorial is most helpful, but having an integrated tutorial complete with gameplay would have served a more functional purposes. Otherwise, prepare to face a lot of trial and error if you’re diving head first into Scenario Mode. Might I suggest a few hours during Free Mode to go completely nuts, just to see what you need to avoid the worst-case scenarios involved in poor budget and improper cultural planning.