I just got it (on sale over at Amazon for $40, in case anyone's interested), and I actually like it quite a bit. I fully expected it to be mediocre, but once I started getting into it all of that scathing internet hatred surrounding it just melted away. It gave me that warm fuzzy feeling of being a kid playing with toys, or being at an amusement park or something - there was something about watching my little city grow and seeing all the little Sims bustle about that was just really cool and pretty darn fun. It has flaws, of course. The city sizes are too small. The game feels restrictive, and I really do wish EA would stop holding our hands and just undo the leash - give us a game that's offline and that we can mod. Overall though, it's just plain fun. And that's what a game should be. Any other Uber-ites playing SimCity? Or am I the only one who's defected to EA...
It's fun enough, but my biggest problem is that the underlying simulation is too unreliable and poorly architected. Now, I haven't played since the latest patch, and I know they've put a lot of work into improving things in the sim. I don't think the game is bad, I think they just released too early without enough time to let QA really do their job and subsequent analysis. It's on my list to get back to once I've finished playing through the Starcraft 2 campaigns. (yes, I am THAT behind on my gaming)
I understand the feeling of it being released too early, afterall I did wait until just now to get it. (...and I've never actually played the campaign on SC2, is that a sin? Haha)
People had more of a problem with the launch than the game itself. The launch is long gone so you are probably not experiencing related issues.
You had to be there during release to fully understand the hatred. It was literally unplayable. If you we're lucky enough to connect to a server, you were greeted with more than a few broken features along with the certainty that you wouldn't be able to connect to that server again and continue said city. It didn't help that a single dude was able to hack in an offline mode and bypass the city boundaries within days. Anyways, I plan on playing it some more once I'm in the mood. Have they added a way for water to replenish or is it still finite?
And the aquifer's themselves do replenish after a while.. but it's months of game time for a fully depleted aquifer to come back to a usable level. But as grim said.. water plant next to sewage treatment, and you're set, since all the clean water from the treatment plant gets dumped into the ground.
Oh, we'll there goes one of the problems I had with the game. I'll have to test that when i get home, I think I thought the treatment plants just cleaned ground pollution or something like that. Still, I find it kind of silly that the giant river flowing through my boundary is good for nothing, and that there's meteors and zombie apocolypses, but no rainfall.
I feel it was a deserved bashing and not just for the DRM, the game is not up to par with the rest of the series. A relative bought it and I played it a few weeks after release, connection time was a little slow but no deal breaker. Lots of little things pile up to make a game that is average, just not good enough. I found watching some lets plays more entertaining than playing. Not that it matters when all the old games are there forever, play them instead. New games like PA are a rare exception for me.
I feel the game was not bashed hard enough. The biggest flaw: Was almost swept under the rug by the problems on launch with the ham-fisted and unecessary DRM. I was really looking forward to a new Sim City but I will not spend a single dime on this mess. The game is called Sim City. This suggests that I can simulate a city, not a small town. On top of that the immersion is completely broken as skyscrapers stand as a solid block on empty grassland. The simulation is a disgrace. They only simulate a small percentage of your Sims - which would be excusable if it was not noticeable in the stats and if the Sims behaved at least somewhat rationally. The sim however is broken beyond repair and creates confusion and disbelieve. Here is a happy city with 1.3 million Sims, 266 of them employed. I wonder where they buy their groceries though since there are no supermarkets or shops of any kind. Well, done Maxis. Sim City 2013 certainly encourages the player to experiment...
It just feels like they limited themselves too much by trying to make it look nice and pretty, and trying to make it a multiplayer game: two things SimCity games don't particularly need
