Rating: 
Summary: COMPLETE WASTE!!!!
Review: I wanted a fun game but I'd have to quit my job to play this thing. It took up so much memory that I noticed my NEW computer slowing down in all applications. I attempted to play close to 10 times and couldn't manage to get past a few starting tasks. I put it back in the box and have tried to return but Amazon.com won't take it back. I put it up for sale, no bidders. I heard that many buyers were going to EA Games to send it back and they would send you a NEW game to exchange at store for full refund, but my attempts at doing that were about as fruitless as playing the game. Don't waste your money like I did!
Rating: 
Summary: Good graphics aren't everything...
Review: I say that because most players have to turn down the graphic detail of their city in order for it to run on their computer. I have a P4 3.0, 30G HD, 512RAM and it runs the smaller and medium cities very well, but churns hard and even freezes up on the larger cities. When graphics are turned up to high, the buildings in the city are very nice to look at, but most computer players can't PLAY in this mode... it is a game that is very taxing on your hardware. I found that the longer I played my cities at one sitting, the slower my computer got and it couldn't keep up with the city growing. I was disappointed in this game and it pains me to say that because I have been a big Maxis/SimCity fan since Day 1. I think SimCity 3000 Unlimited was a much better game with a lot more things to do than just build a city. After playing a few cities on SC4, I have actually become bored with the game and doubt I will play it much anymore (unless maybe if they release an expansion pack with a building architect, city scenarios, etc.). This game just does not have much to keep you coming back for more game play like SC3 Unlimited. Once you figure out how to build a perfect city, SC4 becomes quite a bore.
Rating:
Summary: Almost There . . .
Review: The graphics and detail are superb. But there are many things lacking in this new version of Simcity. The documentation is poor. There is no random generation of landscapes. And even on a Pentium 3 1 gig with 256 RAM, the program grinds very slowly. I am not sure that it is sufficiently different from its predecessors to warrant new attention, while its slowness makes it less playable . . .
Rating:
Summary: Wait for it to be in the bargin bin.
Review: I anticipated this game to be totally amazing. The screenshots and description of the new features screamed "this game will be totally awesome, buy it"! Well the game is nice, but the dynamics added to the game are beyond difficult to use and make the game become tedious and rather unappealing quickly. I seriously enjoyed Sim City 3000 much better. If they could have simply made the graphics and features better, but used the simcity 3 game engine I think everything would have ended up much better. Beyond it losing its appeal rather quickly, the game is VERY demanding on hardware, which is something I actually applaud. It's about time software catches up with hardware and uses it to the max and gives companies a reason to increase system performance, but the recommended requirements they put out are what bothers me. Simply triple what they recommend, and you may get decent game play. Though, this game seems to not have been tweaked for performance at all, there are people with top of the line Athlon XP 2800 or Pentium 3GHz systems with fast hard drives and graphics hardware, and they too have issues running this game w/o lag. That to me is poor game tuning and performance, and the recent patch doesn't address this issue at all, rather it adds SOME of the things they said were going to be in the game and forgot. ... This game needs serious core improvements, something a patch won't address. Some people say "an add-on pack may address these issues like when the sims performance increased after patching to sims livin' large,etc" ...
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, but they took the fun out
Review: I've played every SimCity so far released and started re-playing SimCity 3000 in anticipation of SimCity 4. After spending some time with SimCity 4 my advice would be... don't rush. The game is even better graphically, and it runs just fine on my not-all-that-up-to-date PC. (the other reviews here had be pretty worried.) It does start to slow down after a bit it hasn't crashed yet. Zones can be built on land that's not flat, so I no longer spend all my time re-leveling blocks so that certain size zones can be laid out. (a major time consumer with S3K.) There are cute animations at the closest zooms, although they could have left out the road builder for my money. There are more options on things that can be built - quite a few different park options. So far, so good. What's missing is variability in play. Instead of Easy, Medium, Hard and Scenario with choice of starting year, there's just one setting. You get 100K and good luck. THAT is what everyone is complaining about. Many S3K Mayors like to just start an easy game, get a nice income going, and lay out a neat city. You can auto-budget and not have to worry about money - just zones and roads and parks and trees. This makes SC more of a simulation than a game - there's not much challenge, but playing in the sandbox is fun. Other S3K Mayors like to try their hand at running a resource-constrained city. This makes it more like a game than a simulation. For a real challenge you can play one of the scenarios that SC has always included. Well, the people responsible for SC4 must not have spent much time talking to very many of the people who played the previous SC incarnations. You can only play this SC as a game - as the Mayor of a resource-constrained city that needs babying while you hang on for your political life. If you like that, good for you. If you just wanted to build an easy city you very well might be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: SimCity 4 Is the Best.
Review: I bought SM4 as a Valentine gift for my husband.He cant get enough of it. The only problem is that on the weekends he wont do anything but play SM4.lol
Rating:
Summary: New psychiatric disorder..."Sim Mania"
Review: The premise of the new installment of Maxis' Sim City is be God, be Mayor and play with your Sims. I have been debating whether or not to purchase this game since it was release and I finally bought it a few days ago. I haven't played it much during this time period, so bear with me I may update this after further game playing. First off let me warn those out there that have an aging computer system, don't get this game without first getting a new computer you will probably not have a good experience with this game. So if your not planning on upgrading to a Pentium 4 system, I would stick with 3000 Unlimited, great graphics or not, it is not worth having multiple headaches from technical problems and computer crashes. Comparing this purchase to the one(6 months ago) that I bought the SimCity 3000 Unlimited, I have to say that I haven't played this one as much. Which can be due to a couple of factors: one being I don't have as much time now as I did then. Another reason is I was already familiar on what it needs to make a "successful" city, or at least I thought so. This version of the game seems to me harder, even if they give you more money to work with. However I guess that inflation has hit Sim City (I guess that Sim Nation's economy is taking a hit like our real world). The monuments and famous land marks are no longer free, and they put a dent in your City's budget. In fact other things seem more expensive with this game including the price of it. I would have to take out loans to be able to pay for my other loan payments...which on average would cost about S 30,000 per fiscal year...kind of hard to do when you have a city income of about S 1,500. Needless to say that I have been impeached sooner with this version then the last:) However not all is bad, the graphics are great and it is cool seeing the Sims actually building. Some complaints that I had about the old version were: difficult to get farms and seaports started. This is resolved in this version as is my problem with the airport zoning. For both the airports and seaports they are prefabricated in this game...meaning they are more expensive to build and maintain, but at least it looks nice. As for as the farm or argiculture zoning...they are specifically zoned for no longer do you have the chance of factories building on the low industrial zones. In the "god" mode of the game (before you switch to mayor mode) there is more options to how you want the geography of your city, plus you can put animals such as horses and deer. Once you have switched to mayor mode, you can go back to god mode, but your options are reduced. There are new disasters, a giant Servo on the loose to distory parts of the city. As for the option to play with your Sims... Let's just say that this feature will need some work. The most that you do with your Sims is move them into their first house. They do give feed back as to what your doing wrong and what is going right for them. I had one Sim complain that she didn't like having to drag her kids across town to school. So over all I am ho-hum about Sim City 4, but not totally disappointed with my purchase. I recommend this game if you have (1) a fairly new system <1 year old (2) if you thought that playing the odler versions were to one dementional, with the Sims living in your city they give you feedback, and let you know what it is like to live there. Even though you don't have the control over them like in The Sims.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but plays differently from SimCity 3000
Review: Ok, a number of people have complained about the difficulty of gameplay in SimCity 4. I've had this problem too, but then discovered the way around it. Unlike in SC3000, you cannot immediately zone high-density and expect to get a good result. Instead, you must start with low-density zones, and lots of farms, and let your ciites grow. Also, you can use your query tools to individually set the funding for each city building. Thus, you can build schools even when your population is very low, and you set the funding level very low. After discovering these "local funding" tools, I found it much easier to maintain a decent profit -- you only need a small profit to gain money quickly, as you get your surplus every month, instead of every year. If you do get in trouble early, you'll get "reward" buildings to bolster your treasury... The only thing that disappoints me about this game is that it seems you still can't get mega-gigantic cities a la tokyo. The individual city maps just aren't big enough.
Rating: 
Summary: Great graphics but VERY restricted options
Review: All the Sim City games were better than the one before. With Sim City 4 it is great to see the stunning graphics and plethora of new parks, buildings etc. But, unlike previous Sim City games, with Sim City 4 you can't just slap a city together and let your imagination run riot, which I thought was the whole point of having Sim City. You must build up a city from scratch and carefully monitor your expenses. If you go just a little wild, you get fired as mayor. While this is fine, the lack of an option to play the game and see it's true potential without having to do it from the beginning each time is a major downer for this game. Sim CIty 3000 is better.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult and Not Fun
Review: Number of complaints: (1) Aside from the technical bugs and performance constraints (which are considerable), the game suffers from a ton of UI isssues (try reading the news flipper while the game is actually running),
(2) Succes in the game relies on a level of micromanagement that simply isn't fun (there's something fundamentally not right about a toy that fosters frustration and stress)
(3) The rules and simulation parameters aren't intuitive (how is anyone supposed to know that tax rates of 9.0% are neutral or that high density zones collect less taxes than low density zones?)
(4) The supplied documentation [is weak]. Unless you're a [real] Sim fanatic, I'd avoid this one.
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