SimCity™ 4 Deluxe Edition

This game is amazing, it has incredible depth and complexity, not to mention fun and addicting gameplay. There is certainly a bit of a learning curve and the UI might be slightly outdated, but the graphics, music and gameplay have all stood the test of time splendidly. The EULA on the other hand is a complete slap in the face. How can EA be so tone deaf as to include this garbage? Fortunately, no account or external launcher is required to play the game. There is no need for the game to connect to your internet, so as long as you have a firewall, you can rest assured EA won't be stealing your data (even though the agreement says they may). The agreement also says the game is not sold to you, but licensed. Whatever, I have the installer, EA can drag from my cold, dead hands.

I needed to uninstall this game along with all cities. Selecting "Yes" (delete all files) at the end of uninstallation process caused ALL files in MyDocs folder to be destroyed. The whole directory was empty.

A lot can be said for the other SimCity titles, most people remember the older Simcity 2000 or even the original. I grew up with Simcity 4 Deluxe and trying to get that game to run on Windows Vista/7 is painful Now in terms of the game, it's the old SimCity formula you know and love. What you get in the Deluxe Edition is the addition of the Rush Hour expansion pack. Rush Hour adds many more building types, transportation options and generally improves a lot about the game. But Simcity 4 like that would be good, but not great. Mods. I usually don't grade a game based on it's addons/mods but they are essential to gameplay. Maxis/EA released this game and it was buggy as anything, many features were lacking that could have been there for ease of access. I cannot state how important mods are to this game. Simcity is only 1.1 gb but my mods folder is 10gb big. You'll want mods like the Network Addon Mod which adds things like proper curved railways, ability to create custom interchanges, underpasses and overpasses, etc. You'll download buildings, fixes for the public transport algorithm, you'll have a blast. My only word of recommendation is to organise all your mods carefully and to remember what you installed last. Order your folders, make a new one for each load of mods you put in, that way if one causes an error or graphical glitch, its much easier to remove.

SimCity 4 to me is the high point of SimCity games which basically only has one major flaw. But that flaw to me detracts so badly from the overall experience that I cannot in good conscience recommend it as a game. And that is: It runs horribly basically no matter your setup. This is a game from 2003. And no system at that time could run the game fluently. And that hasn't changed. On smaller maps it really won't be a problem. But just try the big city tutorial. On both my old Core i7 980X (a six core flagship running at 3.3GHz) and my current Ryzen 7 1700 I get down into single digit FPS when running that map. Other maps I can get into the thirties. But never anything really fluent. This is basically a problem that seems to come with most city builders especially since very few of them seems to use multi core CPUs properly. And SimCity 4 is really the biggest culprit I've seen so far.

Just like it was back in '03! Rush Hour expansion does what it originally did, all buildings are available and the music reminds me of when after school the afternoons were solely dedicated to this game. Now to complete my nostalgic desires comes the original Sims which GOG will finally talk about with EA.