I ordered Sim City Societies, in advance, about year ago for $49.
I had been looking forward to a new version of Sim City for a long time because I was a fan of the Sim City Classic and Sim City 2000.

The installation was a pain. When I finally got it working, I was disappointed because this game was geared to making a play city instead of exploring the problem of how cities should be organized. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'm interested in urban planning.

Thumbs down on this game!

I think this is easier than Sim City 4, but too easy that some of the excitement disappeared. It is also less simulative of real city processes as Sim City 4.

They should just have refined Sim City 4 by including export economies, import and export, banking, stock market, etc... as sort of a mixture of Sim City 4 and Capitalism Plus.

Ever since I downloaded this game, my system has been falling apart. The game was never much fun anyway, since it kept crashing. I truly regret purchasing this game.

This is a really fun game. Even though it's got a lot of bad reviews because of its simplicity and many problems, I think this game is very fun and interesting. It really has changed since SimCity 4, which is also a great game, but they are good changes. The 3D engine is awesome(even though it's a little slow), especially since you can see the sky, and I like the sandbox mode, where you can create the city of your dreams! The updates have added more features to the game, so they are a big part of the game. Very Fun!

What was perhaps the most disappointing thing in a long list of disappointments about this game was that it did not build off of previous SimCity versions. It threw out everything good and started from scratch, and this SimCity bears no resemblance to the other games I loved. Perhaps most egregiously, it imparts no real wisdom as to the cause-and-effect nature of the ecological and societal impacts of the buildings you place. All in all, not at all fun, doesn't really make any sense at all! And I had such high hopes.

ok, so, theres not much i can say about this game. mainly because it wont start up! i have all the system requirements. i'm running windows XP media center edition. i'm on patch #5 already and it still won't start up. unfortunately, i didn't read the other reviews about this game before i got it and i'm sad that I didn't. and their tech support is no help whatsoever. they have nothing in there about this error. trust me, i checked everywhere. and it won't uninstall. well, thats spelling out *Virus like Software!* right there. i heard theres alot of other bugs with this game. so i'm sure that evem if i do just happen to get it running, something else is bound to happen. so, basically, i really can't recommend this game at all.

I have played Sim City and The Sims and liked the idea of building a city based on community values. But this is more of a pretty construction set than a challenging game. First there is no depth to that promised value system. You can put in lots of temples and churches, Orwellian interrogation sites or get heavy into high rises, but you the game play does not differ significantly from one value system to the next. Buildings give or take away points and you are forced to do silly things like insert a ridiculous number of fountains or Real estate offices in order to get enough Prosperity points to build seemingly unrelated items like golf courses, restuarants and hair salons. Adding three fountains to build a hair salon isn't very challenging.

I was hoping that you could stipulate a series of values and let them determine how the people reacted, rather than just building pretty cities. As mentioned in another review, as long as the power is on, you can build a huge city with no water treatment plant, sewerage system or garbage collection. The idea behind the game is a good one but I think combining that idea with the Sim City format was not. The game concept would work much better as an interactive adventure where you play a character and interact directly with citizens to learn how to navigate in their society.

The game ran pretty well on my system but the auto saves were annoying as they occur often and completely halt game play while the program writes to disk. I also found the road tool to be problematic as it seldom correctly reads a simple turn, creating instead a small maze of roadways.

I bought the game yesterday, played it for about 4 hours and the result of that is a medium sized city, lots of medals that don't mean much and a crew of happy citizens. I used the tutorial to start and then built the majority on my own using the "normal" level of difficulty. Since I don't have gigs to burn on my hard drive, I will probably take this game off by tomorrow and end up passing it on to a family member. If you are new to gaming and want to have some fun I highly recommend it as it is much easier to do well in this game than either Sims or Sim City. You can even use it to teach your young kids about living "green," showing them firsthand the effects of pollution and overcrowding.

If you are a serious gamer not into teaching children, you will likely get bored very quickly and should probably skip this one.

The game is probably good for people coming from The Sims line of games who want to try out Sim City for the first time. However, for someone like me that has played the Sim City series from the beginning, it is a huge letdown. If Maxis were still designing the game, they would never have let it fall so far. The game is semi-entertaining for the first 2 or 3 times you play it, but after that it will get very dusty on the shelf.
Technical issues / complaints:
RESOURCE HOG! If your machine has less RAM than a server, and/or a graphics card that is more than a week old, it is probably too weak to really handle this game.
Play DVD. Even with the registration code, you still need to have the DVD in the drive to play the game. This is beyond annoying if you're taking it along on your laptop as a little downtime diversion.
Graphics can get jumpy, and can also develop lines going across the screen.
Even with the latest update, the game still likes to blow up every so often. So, save your city often!

I like this game, which should be obvious because I gave it four stars. The biggest complaint I heard from reading the reviews is that its too easy. I'm not a big gamer, I like the easy stuff so this is right up my alley. I liked Sim City 4 but I could never figure it out, I always wanted skyscrapers but I never could get them and I could rarely go very long without going bankrupt but with SimCity Societies I can play with little limitations. I can play where I have unlimited money and where all building are unlocked and I can build the exact type of building I want. The only thing is where you have to try to keep Authority, Prosperity, Creativity, Knowledge, Productivity and Spirituality over 0, or in the green. You do this by creating buildings that "provide" these things, but some also "consume" these things. It's kind of confusing to explain, you have to see it.
Another thing I've read about is problems with it using/needing too many system requirements, so make sure you check those before you buy it.
And some people complain that its too different from Sim City 4 these are the only big differences I see, and some of them are good
- there are no more zones
-you don't NEED to put in water and garbage
-you get to manually put each building in
-less road choices! this is kind of annoying, all there is are dirt (country) road and roads (in Sim City 4 it is referred to as avenues)
-you can't drive through your town! I hate that this is no longer an option, I loved driving through
-your only transit opinion are bus stops and subways (I'm okay with this, in Sim City 4 my citizens never used any transit stations I put in anyway atleast now they use them!)
-you have your choice of workplaces, homes, decorations, and venues. You need to have enough venues so that people can stay happy and keep going to work
-a million people don't live in one house like Sim City 4! this used to annoy me so much, now its much more realistic

So I really liked this game, but it's not right for people who aren't for those easy simulation games

Overall this game has completely disappointed me. I've been playing Sims 2 and the Civilization series for a very long time and so I've really grown to love management and development games. One of my friends suggested i look into Simcity because it falls in more of a middle area between the two game types.

Unfortunately i started with simcity societies. This game seems like a very simple game where the only real point is to drop random buildings down and try to create one of 6 ideal society types. The buildings have no real relation to one another. For instance if i put a trash collecting plant down it really has no effect on anything especially the cleanliness of the city. If i put a burger joint down versus a tanning salon there is no real difference accept that one may make more money then the other.

You never feel like your managing a living breathing city which really should be the goal. You can't really make any personal touches to anything. And by the end of it all you've earned is a trophy or two that don't give anything worthwhile and an empty feeling that you tend to get after wasting alot of time doing absolutely nothing,

Hopefully this series dies with this one or moves back to its roots and dumps the current development team.

I ended up selling this game to some one. It's decent and definately has better graphics than the past sim cities. However, I found the game play to be poor and generally boring. Once I created the city, it got boring really fast. I think it could use more mini games or something like that. Buy it and play it. But you may get sick of it quicker than you think.

You know, I loved all of the Simcity games and didn't hesitate when I saw this sitting on the shelf. I won't bore you with a lengthy description, just read the lengthy review of the guy before me - I agree with everything he said exactly spot on. I'll add a bit though, if you are like me, and absolutely annoyed with our media and government hammering us with that "Global Warming" hoax you won't be disappointed in this game. As soon as I saw that my city (which functioned completely on hydrogen power) was causing natural disasters in other parts of the world I turned it off. The final insult from EA on this flaming-turd of a game? It won't uninstall. Thanks EA, I'll spend the next three hours of my Sunday afternoon trying to get your propaganda filled, virus-like software cleansed from my system. Too bad EA doesn't sell digital disinfectant.

There's not much I can add to what has already been said about this game. It is very easy to play and looks good, but other than that I can't recommend it. Not to mention the fact that we are now up to patch #5 and it STILL doesn't work right. I have a brand new, fully loaded for gaming computer. In the past I could play for about an hour, then it would crash to the desktop. With the latest patch I get about 30 minutes and the game freezes for no apparent reason. It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing. In fact, it has frozen when I wasn't even touching the mouse. At least before it crashed to the desktop, but with the freezing it is a little more complicated to get out of it without restarting the computer, but it can be done through the Task Manager.

Overall, I personally feel that this game is a total ripoff. They keep trying to add new features with each patch to make it more fun, but I see little or no improvement in the playbility even if it didn't crash/freeze constantly. Pass this one up.

I might be able to write a credible review, but it wont even run on my system! I'm running XP Pro, 4gb memory, S3 video, but only displays black background with green outlines if you zoom out. Totally frustrating, I don't bother with this any more.

Being a real Sims fan for more than 6 years, I hestitated before buying this version. I read a lot of the reviews about how terrible the game is since it's not like the original, how there are system and graphics problems, etc. Well I finally bought it last week and much to my surprise I like it. It is differnet from the other SimCities but that's what makes it fun. I'm running this game on 3GB RAM, 320 GB HD and NVIDIA's 8400M graphics card. The game is a monster space eater so your computer must be up to date. I also downloaded patch 4 from EA games and have played the game for several hours and had no problems. The only downside is that you shouldn't run your virus or spyware while playing and this is a problem if you still want to be online. Otherwise, enjoy it.

I have to agree with the previous posters. I had read about this fifth iteration of the game and was not at all happy with what I was reading. But of an afternoon, I found myself at Target, saw that it cost $[...] (badder sign, I thought) and said, what the heck.
The heck indeed.
I had not heard about all the bugginess - so I assumed it was a fault of the brand spanking new Dell mobile workstation that had been delivered. The machine has monstrous specs for a laptop, is all I will say, runs everything Adobe simultaneously and begs for more. SCS ground the system to a complete halt.
I managed to get through the tutorial, and what can I say: even in free play, the fun of the game for me was...building things. Making the city grow. Balancing its capitalist imperatives with my own aesthetic of urban design. Or in SC4, the regional option was great to juxtapose different cities with 'bedroom communities', industrial wastelands, etc. And transit - again, SC4 allowed regional transport systems, and if you played well, it worked.
I could care less about promoting societal values. It seems like some sort of awfully academic attempt to remake the SC franchise in some Gen-Y friendly way, it's awfully post-modern. If you think "the Sims" games are fun, you'll probably like this one. Me, coudn't abide it.

I am aware of the negative press accorded this game (good ideas let down by poor or convoluted logic driving it).

Having played it for an hour, I realized something -- the background music and the freedom to create and adjust a custom built city was fun, relaxing, and therapeutic. I also enjoyed clicking on individual sims and how they responded to their immediate environment.

I also enjoyed the updated interface; once getting used to it, it was easy to navigate around the city.

The game does have different pre-set challenges, including a free reign mode when you can create and enhance your city at any time, to have unlimited funds but otherwise abide by the game's rules, or work within limited funds and work up. I am content with the "free money mode" and working within the rules, and thinking within their logic behind how the game works.

My computer is running Vista Ultimate (64-bit edition), Intel Q6600 CPU, nVidia 8800 GTS video (640MB RAM), 300GB HD, Sound Blaster Audigy Fatal1ty, et al. It's a fairly new rig. When starting SimCity Societies (SCS), I was told about Microsoft's knowledge base article 940105. My system is already patched. I have had no crashes or other anomalies. Yet.

While existing reviews criticizing the game's downsides are correct, the changes put into this new version make it a nice complement to SimCity 4. On those days when I want to micromanage til I puke, I start SC4. If I want to relax, SCS is where it's at. Definitely underrated.

P.S.: The key disc concept is a bit annoying. Be sure to have the disc in your PC when you start the game. Having the legal serial install code isn't enough. :(

The game is fun and entertaining until it starts to crash without letting the player to fully unlock all the medals and trophies. After 30-40 minutes it starts to crash constantly. There is no fun in always having to start over ever so often.

It's a pretty good game. Some things are better than the older simcity games - like not having such a hard time growing the city, not needing the things like water and powerlines, no building maintenance costs and being able to set it up with unlimited money and all buildings unlocked. However, it would have been nice to have these features with everything else from the old game. Having to place each individual building makes it extremely difficult to have anything approaching the size of an actual "city." And the values thing you need to keep track of is at least as restricting as the old version - you end up having to place decorations in very unusual places to do what you want. Hopefully the next version of SimCity goes back to placing zones but keeps the other things that kept you from doing what you want - or at least gives you the option to.

I got this game a few months ago despite the bad reviews and I am glad I did not listen. This is a fun, entertaining, easy game when you just have 15 or 20 minutes to just enjoy a fun activity. All the bugs have been fixed or can be if you go to the simcity societies website and download the latest game update (#4 now). This update even has new add ons, like alien invasion, creature invasion etc.

Having been a SimCity player since the beginning, I enjoyed playing the game, and don't miss some of the chores of SimCity, such as routing your water pipes or subway tubes. I enjoy the new concepts with venues and other buildings developing authority, spirituality, etc. The graphics look good. I wish I could find my rogue sims more easily, and determine why they are unhappy.

My biggest complaint though, is not the game design, it's the system crashes. I can only play for about 30-40 minutes at a time before the screen freezes, I need to hit ctrl-alt-del and end the game and reboot it. I have 3 GB of memory and an NVIDIA 8500 graphics card, so there should not be a problem like this, unless there is some kind of a memory leak or graphics issue in the game itself. I don't have problems like this with any other games or other programs. A good patch might take care of this, but I have the latest.

Was so looking forward to this game. I have a good computer that has never had trouble running games before. This game is full of bugs, three updates have not helped.

It was working. I did enjoy it. Then after reinstalling would refuse to work.

Don't buy it.

I highly recommend SimCity Societies. I needed a good videocard and lots of ram to play it, however. But, when played on a good PC this game is a dream for any SimCity lover. The city is so intuitive and customizable. For example, if you build a city with lots of cafes and villas, it will become a "Romantic City," which will cause the music, the look of buildings, the types of people, and even the signs around town to change to fit the theme. Other theme types include: Authoritarian (jails, correctional facilities, and state housing blocks), CyberPunk (sleep tubes, space elevators, and punk rockers), Fun (clowns, cottages, and arcades). I've replayed this game nearly a hundred times and I never get board of it because the cities change so much every time you play.

I have purchased many EA products over the years. Unfortunately, the new SimCity was rushed to market. The consequence of rushing a product has been two patches that do not fix issues, a third patch was/is promised with an eta that has passed. No new promise date for the third patch. And EA has chutzpah to say they are going to bring to the marketplace an expansion pack without correcting what me and many other people are having problems. I have an up-to-date XP system, with all the bells and whistles that one may want to have. I rebuilt my system less than six months ago, and I have game freeze. I never had to lower my settings with any other EA Sims game. Very disappointing!

The game itself has an intersting concept. It is not SimCity 5. If that is your expectation, you will be highly disappointed. The concept is good and can be expanded if EA wants to do so. But before you purchase it, be sure to go and check sim city website and see if patch three is available and wait and see if that resolves the game freeze issue.

This game has the potential to be something big, however the system crashes doesn't do the game any justice. I have a Quad processor with a GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 over clocked video card with 3 gigs of memory to boot and the game still experiences constant crashes. I've downloaded the patches to no avail. It was quite entertaining for a while but eventually transitioned to pure frustration. I hope the next game is more game user friendly than this one.

This is not SimCity. This game resembles the late 90's game "Constructor" more than it does any of the previous SimCity games. People come back to the SimCity franchise because of consistency, you are rewarded for laying down the infrastructure and planning well. This game takes that completely out of the mix. Instead of random buildings generated according to the mix of factors present in previous SimCities, this game forces you to place each building individually, which to me is more of a chore than laying electical wires, water pipes, or subway tubes. This game completely missed the mark, and it is just not as enjoyable or engrossing as the other versions of this game... even the Nintendo DS version of SimCity is more playable and addicting than Societies. I take no pleasure in writing this review, I was genuinely excited about getting my hands on Societies, and was amazed I was able to hold off doing so until it was bought for me as a present for Christmas. After an hour or two of playing though, it was clear that this was a dud. Just don't tell my mom, I don't want her to think she got me a crappy present!

I have been playing SimCity for ages and I bought a copy of SimCity Societies soon after its release. Normally I would read some reviews before buying a game but with the SimCity sequal I took it for granted that Simcity Societies would be a worthy succesor. I know better now.

True, it is a daring new concept with the emphasis on balancing the 'energies' in your city. But the thing I liked most about the 'old' concept of SimCity is the complexity of appointing RCI zones, managing congestions, dealing/competing with neighbouring cities etc. SimCity 4 showed us some realistic features of City management. SimCity Societies does not even try to be realistic (e.g. police stations making money).

Hopefully EA will come up with a real worthy succesor of SC4 in the near future.

Much of what hardcore Sim City fans love about previous games are missing from Societies. However, there are some fun new features and aspects of this new take on Sim City.

This game will require a lot from your graphics card, and you may even need to upgrade just to get the game to start.

Overall, definitely not the best Sim City game of all time. It wasn't what I was particularly hoping for in the next installation of Sim City, but it's fun to play for a little while. I'm still waiting for Sim City 5.

I bought a computer specifically to run this game because reviews had said it is a total system hog. The new computer had all the requirements listed on the game box. 10 minutes into the tutorial Sim City Societies crashed my computer. Sim City Societies will not run without the disk inserted, which would lead one to believe that the huge graphics are on the disk. They are not. It puts ALL the graphics into your computer. When it crashed my computer and I took the disk out, the computer came back up with Sim City Societies and said "Please reinsert disk". So I did that, and it put ALL the graphics back in AGAIN. I had to take the computer back to the seller for repair. It took more than an hour for the repairdude to get all the graphics back out of the computer AND Sim City Societies had removed essential drivers that had to be reloaded. Sim City Societies might be a fun game if you have a Cray to run it on.

As an avid fan of the Sim City franchise, I was hoping that this game would blow my socks off. It turns out, however, with Will Wright now working on other projects, the game lacks improvement or even playability in almost every aspect of the game.

If it wasn't for the advanced graphics, I would think I was playing an older version of the game from before Sim City 4. A sad day for me.

I bought this game for my 16 year old son for Christmas who specifically asked for it by name. He has 3 of the previous games. He and I were both disappointed for purchasing a game that cannot even play on our computer. After reading the entire box for system requirements, much internet searching and contacting EA games directly, turns out our video card is not supported. So, no game for u. There should have been something indicated somewhere identifying the video card needed for this game to make people aware there could be a problem.

This game is great. My 9 year old loved Sim City. This is more realistic.
The images are cooler, but some of the controls are a little more difficult. There are so many levels to plauing this game. Definitely one he can grow with.

I have been A fan of SimCity games since the 1st. I thing this version is too geared toward new players. I takes the Micro-Managing out of the game, to an extent. I like the Graphics and the interface, but they made a game that is more like a SimCity LITE.

I found this game to be very entertaing. I had a lot of fun placing my own buildings instead of having them randomly appear. Many people compare this game to SC4 saying it's not the same. You can't compare the two because they have different types of gameplay. Sim City Socieities was made by a different developer. It's not called Sim City 5 afterall, so why should it be like the others? I think its an interesting new way to play and will enjoy it for a long time.

It is unfortunate to see that this page of reviews is plagued with people merely complaining, "OMG, this isn't SimCity... I've been a fan for years and I am SOOOO disappointed." What these overly critical reviewers do not realize is that this is not supposed to be the next big SimCity game (as they say, SimCity 5). This SimCity game is made for those of us that don't enjoy lying down overly tedious power lines and sewer systems, but to focus on creating a beautiful and unique society that appeals to our interests and tastes. This was the intent of Tilted Mill and EA.

The focus of the game relies heavily on what the box states (and a lot of people seem to overlook the "Societies" part of the title): Your city affects every individual life in your city. You can actually see all your workers moving about the city when zooming in close. You can check their status and their inventory, their problems and their job, etc. Every building you place in your city has a major effect on the lives of your citizens. The more of one type of building you place (from the range of six cultural values that the game capitalizes on), the more your society changes. Eventually, the entire city will change to reflect the major decisions that you made. I, for example, created an authoritarian city, in which my city was plagued with secret police, security cameras lining the streets, mind controlling facilities, etc. The music, streets, and atmosphere change with your decisions.

When original SimCity fans look for the same features of the previous titles, they are instantly confused and frustrated, and simply look over the complex system that Tilted Mill developed: Every building interacts with each other, and how they interact, reflects in the Sims that live in your society. If you play the game all the way zoomed out, you will not notice anything spectacular. However, if you zoom in close and watch the interactions on the streets and around your buildings, the complexity of the game is apparent.

This game is for people who'd rather be creative and focus on creating a beautiful city of their dreams. They have the ability to decorate, and build their city in any manner that they desire. That was the objective of the game designers. It is for those people who always couldn't stand SimCity because of all the tedious micromanagement and always thought when placing city-zoning that "I'd rather be placing the buildings themselves." It is meant to be a creative experience.

In this case, it is true that the player has to remain motivated himself/herself to continue building his/her city. The game is purely open-ended, and while you do receive rewards, they are rather easy to get. The "full-strategy" mode that is included in-box is actually relatively easy and the rewards come fast (but, let's keep in mind that this was not the original game designer's intent). To our benefit, the developers have released a patch that includes a new gaming mode (they are obviously listening to the complaints of consumers about the lack of strategy) that is labeled as "Strategy mode." This mode makes the game a bit more of a challenge to handle: building maintenance costs are introduced, citizens work more play less (making them harder to please), and other more "micro-management" aspects. This mode gives that extra edge for those of us that need the "extra-motivation" to keep building. It's a nice addition, and will simmer some of the overly critical complaints of the game.

Overall, this game is fantastic. I have yet to experience any crashes or bugs. The game does begin to lag when cities become massive (which is, no doubt, from the complex interaction of all citizens and buildings). I say that if you are not a fan of the regular SimCity, then you'll enjoy this game. If you are looking for SimCity 5, then realize that this is NOT what this game is supposed to be, and move on. This game deserves MUCH MORE credit than what it has been given.