This is our latest Review in Progress, or RIP, this one covering SimCity. Come back all week as we prepare our review.

SimCity was released by Maxis and EA around midnight last night (or something like it – I waited until1 AM before calling it a night, and it still wasn’t live for me) through Origin, EA’s answer to Steam. Rather than debate Origin vs. Steam, which I would kind of like to avoid, we’re going to focus on the game at hand.

SimCityOr at least, we’ll try to. When I started out, I logged in and played through the tutorial before starting my own city. I played it for a short before logging out. Upon return, I noticed I was playing the Europe West 1 server. Attempting to go to North America East 1 froze the program. When I finally got onto the server I wanted, I tried to create a city. I was told, repeatedly, that I “could not claim a city now. Try again later.” After being told this about 10 times (I’m a slow learner apparently) I logged off.

Coming back tonight, I returned to server North America 1 but was told I had to do the tutorial again. I’ve done it twice now; once in beta and once to start my city on the European server – and I didn’t really like it either of those times. It doesn’t teach you a whole lot and holds your hand too much. I quit the tutorial to try and skip it, but the game told me I still had to play the tutorial. Now frustrated I attempted to play through it as fast as possible but once it loaded in it was frozen. Nothing would react and the scripted sequences wouldn’t start. Wonderful.

SimCity

This is all so frustrating because the game is fun when it works. Buddown, seen here, is that city I built on Europe West 1. I can still play there, which is a plus. The game looks good, like a small model city.

SimCity

There are over a dozen image filters to play with as well, which don’t add much to the game but the artist in me loves it.

I’ll be return after I get some more play time in to continue SimCity, RIP.

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