Genre: Simulation
Publisher: EA Games
Developer: EA Japan
Release Date: June 19, 2007

Buy 'SIMCITY DS': NDS

Picture this: a large city nestled in the mountains. As the sun sets over a nearby river, the population of 100,000 people heads toward their beds for a night of slumber. Suddenly, without warning, a giant ape attacks! What's a city to do? Call upon their mayor to save them – which is exactly what you'll have to do in SimCity DS.

SimCity DS is a heavily modified update of SimCity 3000, the Will Wright classic about building, maintaining and successfully running a city. You begin by selecting a chunk of land upon which you will build your metropolis, and from there, you select an adviser, sign the town charter and get to building.

For the few who've never played a SimCity title before, I'll include a brief gameplay overview. As the city's mayor, you have to balance the zoning of the land between residential, commercial and industrial zones. On top of that, you have to build roads, maintain transportation, adjust the tax base and decide how to spend the money you have. (If this seems complicated, you may want to take a few Advil because it's just getting started.) From there, you want people to actually live in your town, so you try to make it appealing by juggling issues like water, power, pollution, garbage, health and crime. Just when you think you're getting the hang of it, an earthquake comes along and destroys half of your city. It's this sort of complexity and detail that has kept the SimCity series near the top of the lists of greatest games of all time, and SimCity DS is no exception. The title makes a wonderful transition to the handheld console and makes excellent use of the touch-screen to enhance the gameplay. Newcomers to the SimCity franchise would do well to take advantage of the game's tutorials.

SimCity DS departs from the original material in a number of ways. Whereas SC300 had a number of advisers who all worked together to help you maintain your city, SCDS only gives you one adviser at a time. Every once in a while, usually when you really neglect one aspect of your city, a new adviser will approach you and offer to help you out. At that time, you can choose to trade in your old adviser for a new one, or stay the course.

The DS' two screens split up the game information, showing an overview of your city — including population, funds and important information from your adviser — on the top screen. The bottom screen handles anything you interact with, such as the actual building of your city, or shifting through numerous informational graphs, such as crime maps, pollution charts and the city budget. For the most part, the two-screen system is very efficient, but it can be a little troublesome during the building process. With the isometric view and weak camera zoom, it's easy to place buildings in the wrong spot, but the action can easily be undone. The bulldozer action, however, can't be undone, so before you raze that skyscraper, be very sure that you've selected the correct building … and steady your hand.

SCDS also offers a number of timed scenarios that break up the main game quite a bit and allow you to take control of a city somewhere else in the world that has just been racked by some disaster. You are given a goal, time limit, and failure condition (i.e., returning the population to 100,000; 10 years; and funds being depleted, respectively). The settings are quite fun and vary quite a bit in terms of difficulty.

The mini-games in SCDS also make good use of the DS hardware. You use the microphone to blow out fires; a giant monster will occasionally attack your city, so you'll have to use the stylus to aim the crosshairs and fire tranquilizers at the beast; and at Christmastime, you have to assault Santa Claus with your stylus to make him drop presents. The quicker you work through these mini-games, the more gracious your denizens will be, and the bigger the bonus you'll receive from them. The mini-games are really simple when compared to the complexity of the main game, but they provide a nice departure from the mundane number-watching that tends to overtake city-building.

Now, despite the massive amounts of praise I've heaped on Sim City DS, there are some minor problems that I've encountered. The graphics took a bit of a downturn compared to the PC counterpart; while SC3000's visuals are big, colorful and vibrant, SCDS scaled things back a bit, with dull colors and less-detailed buildings. There is quite a bit of slowdown when looking at the overview of the city; cars jump forward on the road, and trains will disappear altogether, only to pop up again later in their routes.

The slowdown is the most apparent on the ticker, which is supposed to scroll recent, useful information across the bottom of the top screen. The text moved along so slowly that it became too difficult to wait for the ticket to scroll through its information while keeping a watchful eye on the city. I would have preferred something like a multiple adviser system, which would let me request the relevant information when I want or need it.

The sound in Sim City DS can be grating at times. Instead of voices, the developers decided to use a series of beeps whenever anyone talks to you. While it's not horrible, it can get on your nerves quite a bit, due sheer number of people who will stop by your office to suggest buildings that the city could use. Truth be told, there's really not much of a reason to keep the sound, so if the sound effects annoy you, turn the volume down. You won't miss anything.

As mentioned above, you'll be plagued by visits from the town's residents, and they all want something from you. It could be a firefighter who would like a place to play baseball after he and the "fellas" get off of work, or it could be a local student who would like some additional parks or zoos to fill her leisure time. As the mayor, you can choose what goes into your city, and therefore, can choose whether to listen to the people or not. If you do, they'll heap praise on you, and if you don't, they'll curse you. The game doesn't really show any consequences for making either decision, so you usually turn them down to save money.

The natural disasters can also get on your nerves quite a bit. As in real life, they seem to come out of nowhere and destroy half of what you spent the past few "years" creating. Now, the natural disasters themselves are perhaps inconvenient, but it's a pain to clean up and rebuild, mostly because of the isometric view and the required use of the Bulldozer of Ultimate Destruction. All of the destroyed land is colored white, so you know you're in the correct general area, but because of the view, you may not be able to see it all when you need to clean it up. This leads to a lot of frustrating guesswork as you punch the stylus in the general area and hope you don't demolish something you actually needed. You can turn off the disasters or even tone them down, but then it feels like you're missing out on something the developers wanted you to experience. I would've preferred a way to rotate the city view a bit, but I would have even settled for a completely top-down view, which would make the rebuilding process so much easier.

Despite these problems, SimCity DS is still a huge game that's easily worth the money for devoted fans of the series and newcomers as well. You'll have to play through at least 10 cities before you see everything the game has to offer, and no other simulation title provides the amount of details and complexity that SimCity DS does. I have no problem recommending this game to anyone who enjoys simulations and wants to be kept busy for a few hours on the DS.

Score: 8.3/10