Disaster

When you finally get bored, you can play with the disasters. All three of them - Storm, Meteor Shower and Earthquake.

SimCity Societies is simply a horrible title. As a city building simulation it utterly destroys the fine lineage of SimCity games while unnecessarily reinventing the whole concept to be more like The Sims. In fact, the box should say "Sim Societies" - that would describe the contents far better, and who knows, players of The Sims might like the idea better; at least the UI and "gameplay" seems to be tailored towards them.

The only problem is that most of them won't have the hardware. If The Sims 2 and it's requirement for a DX9-level card was a harsh pill for the casual gamers who got used to being able to play The Sims on just about any PC in the existence, SimCity Societies happily trashes all those nice midrange systems people have bought for The Sims 2, asking for top end hardware to run the bloated city simulation and the buggy 3D engine. It's hard to believe that anyone could make a city building simulation that ends up having a too poor frame rate, but SimCity Societies manages to pull off this questionable trick.

It's really hard to recommend SimCity Societies to anyone. Casual gamers won't have the necessary hardware, SimCity fanatics are already planning to burn EA at the stake for the heresy of calling this mess "SimCity", and the rest of us - the more hardcore gamers - will drop the title in a hot second, as there is hardly anything you could call a "game" here. So, I recommend giving Societies a miss. It's not like the stores are devoid of good games at the moment.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium 4 1.7 Ghz or equivalent AMD processor	Not specified
Memory	512 MB
Graphics Card	DirectX 9 128MB with Pixel Shader 2.0 support
Graphics Card Example	ATI Radeon 9600 series / NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 series
Free Disk Space	2.1 GB
Net Link	Not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon64 3500+ / Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz	AMD Athlon64 X2 4600+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X800XT 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS 256MB	ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 512MB
Free Disk Space	2.1 GB	2.1 GB
Net Link	Not specified	Not specified

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	43	There is honestly no game here. SimCity was always bit of a "software toy", but Societies removes the "balance the city books" part of gameplay and replaces it with a simple Sims-style concept - "keep buying stuff until you grow bored".
Graphics	83	Visually passable, if a bit cartoony. There is a lot of detail and a huge variety of buildings, but models and textures don't hold up that well up close. Also, the vast majority of players will have to opt for lower quality graphics due to the inefficient engine.
Audio	58	Canned effects, weak music, all around aurally unimpressive - not that the audio matters much in a city simulation.
Technology	44	A complete and utter disaster - unstable on NVIDIA hardware, crashing repeatedly. Performs poorly on any hardware though, and gets slower and slower as your city grows.

OVERALL

This is not SimCity. This is a cheap knock-off with The Sims UI and concepts transplanted to a city building "game" that isn't much of a game. Takes the whole concept of "casual" to the extreme while rushing for the Christmas market. End result is a rushed and buggy software toy.

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