We may never see its like again
Twenty years later - thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community - SimCity 4 is the best of allSimCitygames. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it’s also the best citybuilder.
Setting aside fantasy and medieval variants, the template laid down by the SimCity series remains the expectation for most citybuilders. As the mayor of a fledgling town, you zone commercial, residential and industrial districts, place down amenities and services to satisfy residents, and attempt to balance the budget as your town begins to take on a life of its own. Then, when you’ve constructed a sprawling metropolis and have grown weary, you trigger some natural (or unnatural) disasters and start over.
SimCity 4 did nothing to change this formula but continued its logical progression. It has 3D terrain and crisp, clear sprite-art buildings, which are one of the reasons it still looks great today. It lets you build enormous cities, and then trade resources with the neighbouring city you built previously. It has a day/night cycle, so you can see your skyscrapers twinkling in the dark. You can plop individual Sims into your city -The Sims1 released in 2000 - and then track their lives as they commute from your polluted suburbs to their awful job, then move out of town or die.
Perhaps most importantly, SimCity 4 included the BAT, the Building Architect Tool, which enabled modders to create their own buildings and place them in the game. Custom buildings, maps and mods have greatly extended the life of SimCity 4 and at the time of writing there are over 21,000 filesavailable from community site Simtropolis, including several new uploads in the past 24 hours.
