City Life 08 brings back all that Sim City was. It tries to add on to the City-Building genre but falls a little short.
Product Information
•Genre: Modern City Building
•Developer: Paradox Interactive
•Publisher: Paradox Interactive
•Players: 1 Player
•Online: No
•Age: Teen
•Release Date: July 29th, 2008
•Price: $29.99 (At time of review)
City Life 2008 is tagged by developer Paradox Interactive as a next-generation city builder. It is a follow up to the somewhat successful original City Life that was released in June of 2006. Paradox Interactive reworked the games entire 3D game engine and animations to hopefully give the player total freedom of construction when they began creating their new city. City Life 2008 is somewhat of a standalone expansion for the original City Life. It comes with 60 new buildings, 10 new maps, the possibility to import real life satellite maps, and enriched and improved BCE.
As with a all other Modern City Building games the premise of the game is pretty simple, build a city from the ground up and take care of it. City Life 2008 lets you construct villas in residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers in financial districts and gives you the tools necessary construct the city of your dreams. You must also take care of the citizens that occupy your city. You must supply them with employment, health care, entertainment, and much more. It's up to the player to take care of their city. The player must deal with real life situations such as pollution and traffic. One thing that sets this Modern City Builder apart from others is its six unique subcultures. The player must keep peace between these six subcultures or face conflicts between them such as riots and fires.
Graphics: 6/10
So let's start off with graphics. FYI, I ran the game with all graphic features set to high with a screen resolution of 1280X1024. As stated above, Paradox Interactive completely reworked the 3D game engine for City Life 2008, and it shows. One of the great things I really like about this game is the zoom in feature. After you construct a building you can zoom in to ground level and take on a first person view to look around the area. This is where the 3D graphics really come in to effect. The first building that you put up is your city hall. After construction is finished on your city hall you can zoom into first person view and see flags waving on the flag post, citizens busily walking around and automobiles driving on the roadways. The ocean water looks amazing as waves move around with the current and every now and again you will the shadow of a major airliner flying overhead. If you turn around and look straight at the sun, you can really see the 3D engine colors come to life. The reflections from the water and sun look amazing and the movement of characters and animals in game are great. The characters are somewhat blocky when you go into first person view and some of their faces are kind of smeared on, but I would expect something like that when a 3D engine is trying to generate a city population of 10,000 + people. I'm not saying that this is fantastic graphics, but for the price of the game it is fair to say the graphics are on par.
Sound/Music: 4/10
Not really much to say about this. It's kind of like elevator music, only a little worse. I think a little more work (ok, a lot more work) could have gone into the music and sounds. The music is ok, but it does nothing to promote the game play, which is what game music should do. Sounds are pretty much non-existing.
Controls: 7/10
The controls are pretty basic. You only need your mouse and keyboard arrows to fully play the game. Things can become a tad bit tricky when it comes to throwing down a new residential or commercial division. Laying down new roads or other transportation services can also become a little hectic when having to do it with a jumpy mouse.
Game Play: 7/10
Let's get down to the most important thing, the game play. As you can imagine, City Life 2008 is much like all other city building games. You start by laying down some residences so that people can move into your city and then you lay down some businesses so they have a place to work. This is all pretty basic stuff when it comes to city builder simulations. One of the nice things about City Life 2008 is that right above ever residence is a little icon that tells you what the residence needs, if anything. So if you see a picture of a shopping bag over a particular residence then you know that those citizens would like a shopping mall placed somewhere around their residence. The main objective of this game is to make your citizens happy as your city continues to grow.
After playing the game for a couple of minutes you will quickly realize the big key difference that sets this game apart from other city builders. The population of your city is broken down into 6 different sub cultures. You have the Elites, Suits, Radical Chic's, Blue Collars, Fringes and Have-nots. It is your job to keep all of these different sub cultures happy while you build your new city. Sounds simple, but after you play for about 10 minutes I'm sure you will be dealing with some kind of culture tension between these sub cultures. It becomes a challenge to keep the tension down because Blue Collars can only work at Blue Collar businesses and live in Blue Collar residential neighborhoods and the same goes for all other sub cultures. As you can probably tell, this system of sub cultures can become a very big challenge and its starts right when you begin building your city.
As you move through the game and your city starts to grow you will be required to give your citizens more services. You will need to install hospitals, police stations, fire stations, grocery stores, entertainments venues, parks, transportation and a handful of other essential services. You will have to fight living cost, taxes, culture tensions, pollution, traffic, budgets and a handful of other real life problems. As you move through the game and your city grows you will start to unlock many new building and venues. When you start the game a number of the constructable buildings are locked and you have to work to get them.
Replay Value: 4/10
Well the replay value pretty much depends on how much you like playing city building simulators. If you like to build cities over and over again, then you are set for hours and hours of game play. If you are not a big city building fan then you will probably be bored with City Life 2008 after a couple of hours of game play. There is no online or multiplayer support for this game, so the fun pretty much stops after conquering your first city.
To Buy Or Not To Buy:
Again, this all depends on how much you like city building simulators. If you where/are a fan of the Sim City series from Maxis, then this might be a good game for you. Personally, I would wait for a good $10 price cut before throwing down money for this game. You may get a few good hours of game play from City Life 2008 before you start to get bored with it.
Final Score:
Here is the moment of truth. The final score is taken from the sub categories listed above and the game is given a score with 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest.
• Graphics: 6/10
• Sound/Music: 4/10
• Controls: 7/10
• Game Play: 7/10
• Replay Value: 4/10
Final Rating: 5.6/10