It's SimCity-4! What more can be said? What more NEEDS to be said?

This is easily the premier city-building game ever made. And with the recent disaster which is SimCity-5, this will most likely FOREVER be the best. It's bee-you-tee-full, relatively bugless (unlike the recent "sequel" ), & has ultimate replayability.

A 5-Star game, easily deserved. I've played it on & off for years. After a lapse of a couple years, & upon seeing that there was no reason to buy the newest one, I decided it was time to start this one up again. I guess I lost my old copy, so this was my second buy of this game ... a re-buy which didn't bother me at all.

It's just that good.

After the disaster of SimCity 2013 with it's always online DRM controversy, I decided to pick this up to see what it was all about. For the price, it's a fantastic city building game thaat offers a lot of replayability through mods. The UI could use some work(even though there's probably a mod for it that I missed), but if you can overlook the frustrating features that it carries with it, it's quite worth the money.

This game is quite enjoyable, but also feels quite dated, which of course it is. As a way to recapture old glories it can be worth some time, but it may also frustrate. The customization features are quite limited, most noticeably the lack of easy terrain design across regions. That said, there is real value here if you are willing to overlook the limitations.

I grew up playing the original SimCity and SimCity 4 still has what I like about this series. Now my 9 year old daughter is playing with me. It is games like this that not only entertain but teach that really excite me. Sure, I love my share of first person shooters, but I honestly feel games like this can really help with real life skills such as budgeting, time management and prioritization of action.

The series continues to improve with each release and while I certainly don't sink the time in to this game that I did years ago, I continue to enjoy playing and I am looking forward to the next release in 2013.

Create the most massive region of cities ever, with a farming town, bedroom community, high-tech commercial center, and industrial backbone. Take complete control of your city's transportation system and solve U-Drive-It missions from fighting crime to tackling disasters. As your Sims become more mobile, your population skyrockets. Can you successfully create and manage your own living and breathing megalopolis

The pinnacle of the series, with hundreds of mods to enhance, and customize the game to your heart's content. Though the lack of a 3D engine was a let down for many, the charm of the sprites/isometric view are perfect to show realism with a touch of fun. A must buy for anyone who loves the series or is looking for a great city builder, as this is THE city builder.

SimCity 4, NO this is not a traffic sim, NO this is not a economic management sim, NO this is not a driving sim, NO this is not any kind of obscure faction sim, this is ALL OF THE ABOVE! sim city controls all aspects of a city and dose so extremely well. Sim city 4 is A spectacular city sim! And why wouldn't it be? Everyone knows that Sims is the best name in simulation! so here are some pros and cons:

Pros:

+One of the best, most elaborate city Sims ever!

+Lots of pre-built landscapes to play around in, as well as the option to create new nations

+Plenty of unlockables

+very well balanced

+Completely optional driving mini games are surprisingly fun and rewarding.

+plenty of destructive powers in the "God mode" that you can use to destroy you whole city (and only save the massacre if you want to) for fun, or as a low budget way to get rid of unwanted biuldings

Cons:

-No input from Sims creator Will wright

-Graphics are out dated (But not enough to effect game play once you tweak them in the settings)

-This is a big one, as far as I can tell there is NO wide screen options D:

Finally I would like to make it clear how the city selection system works

You pick a city from the nation (Large land mass with the different spaces for citys and citys you've built) and you can switch between nations as well as make your own nation picking from flat grass and all water. (Terra forming is available for free before you start playing in you town, at witch point you have to pay for it)

DELUXE EDITION: this includes the rush hour expansion, which adds more options for traffic control.

-Chance Hogan

I once owned a copy of this game, before I eve bought SimCity 4. It's good enough, though, that I think I will keep the version I've got, here. The 2.5D graphics, as they once were called, are a very new take on the SimCity franchise. In terms of realism, they are much better than the graphics of SimCity 3000. I also like how you can make as many cities of as many sizes on whatever kind of terrain you like. AND the cities can collaborate together if you make them all on the same map. There really should be a multiplayer version.

The Drive Missions are less-than-realistic, with cars being able to be crashed at least ten times before it explodes in a ball of fire. And they can really be a pain to drive through. Although it is fun in free mode.

If you have the Sims (original), you can import Sims from that game into your town(s). I don't exactly get the point of that; it did not appear to be well executed.

Indeed, the mass transit systems never seem to be used often, and this makes me wonder how effectively they were added to the game. No one takes the train, or the ferry. It's always the roads and the highways!

And unlike the previous Sim Cities, where buildings are fairly easy to customise - Sim City 3000 Unlimited even had a building editor - SC4 has three "themes" from different points in time you can choose from, and little customisation (unless you are a programmer).

I was glad to see they gave cities "Houses of Worship" after they reached a certain point. I wish they had been a bit less vague, perhaps allowing us to choose a Church, a Mosque, or a Temple, or somesuchthing. But that's the inclusive language of commercialism, I suppose. Still, better than nothing.

4/5 for better graphics, a fun new drive mode, an easier and more powerful editor of both cities and terrain, the ability to make several cities collaborate with each other on the same map, and a good feel overall.

Pros: Well built city building simulator follows closely in the footsteps of its predecessors. Being able to create multiple cities and connect them is nice. I was able to create an environmentally friendly city next to my industrial power house and have the industrial city take the garbage from the green city. And the industrial city made money by doing it...certainly it made it more polluted, but that was the point.

The ability to rezone from low density to medium to high while there are structures already built there is a nice improvement over older sim cities.

Difficulty was perfect for me. My first city I ended up spending way too much and getting hopelessly in debt because I didn't bother playing the tutorials. Once I went through the tutorials (which are short and easy and not too annoying) I was able to create a city with a balanced budget and semi-functional transportation systems (see cons below for my complaints on that). I've only used medium difficulty so I don't know if easy or hard make much difference, but I found medium to be perfect for a bit of challenge but not frustratingly hard or way too easy.

Graphics are certainly dated, but gameplay makes up for that. I didn't find them so ugly as to distract from gameplay anyway.

Cons: Difficult to get citizens to use anything other than roads for transport. I've tried ferries and subways as the only method to cross a river and no one uses them. Somehow magically people move in on the other side of the river anyway though. Two cars crossing on the ferry and 2,000 people living on the side of the river with no car bridges? A little bit odd.

The "Sims" mode is really lame in my opinion. The you drive it mode where you can pick a vehicle (car, airplane, train, etc) and drive it around your city either in free mode or doing missions sounds cool but is really clunky and not fun. Even using the lock to roads function I often end up failing the mission due to my car blowing up randomly. Other cars fade in and out so it is hard to tell if you're going to be involved in a collision or not. And half the time collisions don't matter at all, you can plow any number of cars off the street with your school bus (the children cheer which is a nice addition) and watch them burn but then sometimes you'll hit one little car and your bus will explode.

Getting comments from your sim citizens in this mode can help a bit with city designing, but mostly just fills up your news feed with worthless information. My recommendation is stay out of "Sims" mode and just stick with "Mayor" mode.

Had some crashing and jittering difficulties as well, not sure if that's just my computer though it runs other more modern games quite well. There doesn't seem to be an autosave that I could find, so I recommend saving often – I lost a lot of progress in a couple crashes.

4 stars: -1 for crashing/bugs

Certainly a solid game. A few graphical bugs here and there but nothing to be upset about (could also be my graphics card; radeon 4680) I really love city building games but I tend to lean more towards the likes of Caesar, Pharaoh, etc. I've played the older simcity games as well however and this is by far the best one. If you were to pick up any simcity game I would strongly recommend it be this one.

Best City Simulator to this day. The game is a tad outdated but gameplay is tops. At Simtropolis download plenty of mods to make SC4 even better

This game is the single best SimCity game out there, and it gave birth to the multiple ones we are seeing today. I highly recommend this to those who want to play the modern city building games and either dont have a fast enough pc or enough money to buy the newer ones.

Quite possibly the best and most advanced city simulation game. Offers great and diverse control on every aspect of the city (from transportation to terrain), offering many hours of fun gameplay. A must have for any city sim fan. The rush hour expansion pack included provides fun unique features such as the ability to drive through your own city and missions.

Unfortunately, this game tends to crash on modern computers but crashes can be fixed/reduced by limiting the game to a single processor core.

Sim City 4 is the ultimate city builder game. Its a sandbox of city building fun. Even though it is several years old at this point, this game still holds its own against games like Cities XL. I'd easily recommended this game to anyone even who has never played it before. It is addicting.

Likely the last of the great Sim City series, the Deluxe Edition provides you with the Rush Hour expansion pack that includes more ways of dealing with traffic. Such as finding out where most people commute and how they get there, which can great ease the process of creating public transportation. Plus there are endless mods available to keep the game feeling new.

If you even have a little bit of imagination, the Sim City franchise is for you. The base game comes with so many building and things to do to build (and destroy) your cities that it will keep you occupied for days. But if you have seen it all, then you can easily remedy that by going online and downloading one of the thousands of mods, some of which contain hundreds of new skins to make the game look like new again.

And being an ego-maniacal "mayor" is just fun in and of itself.