You’d be hard-pressed to find open competition for the Sim City series these days. Granted, a few alternative spin-offs and variations have been tried, but have also slipped under the radar thanks to the major focus on blockbuster hits in the more action-oriented markets. Recently however, I took observance of a new title in the city-building vein, the aptly named ”City Life”, and decided to take a look. To be perfectly honest, I never managed to get into Sim City 4000 in great detail and felt it was missing some of the magic of its classical brethren, so I was most eager to dig in and see what kind of novelties developer Monte Cristo had implemented to make this game stand out.

In a title like this, one would expect the premise to be placed on little more than just building and maintaining a massive city. In fact, much of the focus in City Life isn’t exactly on city-building itself, much to my surprise. Players are actually tasked with creating a proper urban infrastructure in which to attract specific groups of people into their town. The game defines these groups as “Have-Nots”, “Fringe”, “Blue Collars”, “Radical Chic”, “Suits”, and finally “Elite”. The catch is, each of these different groups has their own very distinct tastes and desires, and will often clash with one another when they come into contact. The player’s job, as Mayor of his ticking time-bomb of a city, is to mangle all of these groups into something resembling a peaceful co-existence. But don’t worry – the game doesn’t lump all groups at you at the same time. Rather, the higher-end groups must be unlocked through progress as your city expands further. As you branch out and your population grows, more and more buildings will eventually be made available – these can enable you to cram more people into a smaller zone of space, making for a much more profitable and efficient metropolis filled to the brim with people who want to beat each other to death. Certain assets can also affect your population in a given way – building near a military aircraft carrier (stationed on one map) for example may drastically reduce the chances of heavy crime breaking out.

Due to the game’s initial complexity, new players might find themselves overwhelmed at first just trying to grasp all of the game’s nuances right away. Fortunately, the game does offer some guidance to help in easing in the process (my copy even came with a cool diagram-poster showing the major milestones I should look out for to avoid potential anarchy as the game progresses) through the form of brief animated clips and dynamic tips that suggest where you should go next, though sadly there is a lack of any kind of hands-on tutorial mode to thoroughly teach players the basics. The best approach I can recommend is to try a quick-and-dirty first pass at a city to get ahold of the basics, then go back and start over with your “true’ design. After I finally established a foothold however, the rest of the game flowed quite naturally.

Thankfully the interface is quite well laid out with all of the information needed easily accessible, and if your city happens to be faltering in one area, it only takes a few mouse clicks to find out exactly why and how it can be fixed. Helpful icons will also appear above buildings to indicate when a specific zone is suffering from a given problem, Constructing large-scale residential areas is also surprisingly easy- simply drag and drop out a large plot of terrain, and the game will automatically fill in connecting roads where required. These can then be later destroyed and adjusted as needed. Other aspects of the interface also work very well – individual citizen satisfaction can be easily tallied up to determine where your city needs to improve, and all sorts of comprehensive background information can be brought up at the push of a button. It’s even possible to ‘bookmark’ an individual citizen to track their activities in your city and gain all sorts of information about their daily life and happiness level.

Graphically this game is also quite pretty, making use of fancy pixel shader effects for rendering the water where applicable, and also renders some nice dynamic lighting. Of a cool note is that the game also offers a day/night cycle system, though I was unable to find a way to make this system autonomous, and it looks like instead you can just change the time purely at your own whim. On my top of the line hardware the game also had no problems running smooth, even when I turned the resolution up to the crazy 1680x1050 setting native to my widescreen monitor. One other technical-related thing to keep in mind is that this is also one of the few remaining games to actually still use Starforce as a copy protection medium, so those of you who hate being forced to reboot after installing a title may want to steer clear.

The ultimate problem with the execution in City Life is that, eventually, it becomes something of a perpetually stale experience. Once I learned the basics, I found the same general tactics could be applied in just about any of the game’s several environments to gain success. In addition, while balancing the several groups against one another proves to be quite a challenge, it eventually becomes a case of monotony and a campaign of constantly expanding territory and putting up new buildings to appease the masses until you run out of room – then it comes down to knocking down older structures to improve your basic infrastructure, and then that’s it. This is ultimately what any city-building game might amount to, admittedly, but with the older Sim City titles I at least had some massive goals to strive towards, and some kick-ass upbeat tunes to work with (the music in City Life isn’t bad of course, but it proves to be little more than ambience).

There are of course also the unlockable incentives to move into new territories and challenges, along with a map editor and free-form gameplay mode, though sadly the game lacks any form of multiplayer (a competitive variation might be interesting to try) to expand the experience further. It’s unquestionably good for a city-building romp that will probably last you several days, but beyond this the game lacks the “punch” it needs to keep going. I consider City Life to be quite a novel little game just because there currently isn’t really much else of anything out on the market right now to fill up the gaps with, but some things I can recommend to improve the experience would be more detail on the “down to earth” level (perhaps slow the game’s pacing back a little so that players could really see their cities expand and thrive in real-time, rather than just getting brief animated glimpses of daily life after zooming in), a more comprehensive and hands-on form of tutorial, a slightly more direct interface (for example, it was annoying getting a message that a new building had been unlocked and having to dig through a number of screens to find out what exactly it was), and of course some multiplayer support could really have helped in solidifying the game’s position as a great contender, and perhaps the developers may decide to incorporate some of these options or improvements for a future expansion.