SimCity 4 is far more generous than its predecessors with the latter, allowing you to start with enough money to cover most of a map right from the outset. You build what you want, where you want, with the only limitations being space and money. It’s one of the purest and accessible presentations of the city-building formula out there, with no production chains or unlockables to concern yourself with. Zone density can also be scaled up or down without destroying existing buildings, allowing them to grow or shrink as needed. Each individual service building like police stations and hospitals can have their funding adjusted to meet local demand, so you can build expensive services and then scale them back to what you can afford until you need more. These are all core concepts pioneered by the series, but 4 presents them with greater refinement. You lay down roads, outline zones for development of homes and businesses, build power plants and fire stations, balance your taxes against your utility expenditures, and grow your little town as large as it will go. Honestly I find it a little difficult to describe the nature of SimCity, because it is such an elemental part of the genre. SimCity 4 is often described as the last great SimCity, and with that and my own remembered fondness for it I decided to see how it’s held up over the last 13 years. They’ve come a long way from the original and branched out in many different ways across platforms, and not every installment has been a success. Since 1989, the many entries in the line have allowed people to become virtual mayors and design cities of just about any shape and size, limited only by the contents of the game itself. The simulation genre wouldn’t be what it is without the venerable SimCity series.

Simcity 4 rotate building