SimCity 4 is one of my most played games of all time. Considering the times I spent on Origin, GOG, Steam, and on the disc, I would have spent over 10,000 hours. It is a game that is unspeakable in its profound experience and replayability. It has charm and character that modern city builders are missing and a level of incomparable depth and difficulty. It's older than some people on the planet (over 16 years old!), and it still holds up in graphics and systems. It's a game that is still better than Cities: Skylines and one of the last great EA games. How can I forget the soundtrack! It's amazing! Can't I forget that you can get it for dirt cheap?

It has a very active and passionate modding community (shout out to Simtropolis and SC4 Devotion). Mix in a couple of mods and fixes, such as Network Addon Mod (NAM) and CAM (Colossal Addon Mod), and you got something that is complex and very enjoyable to play. The only complaint is the game's age, it can be very choppy, and loading can take forever on modern systems. The game can be buggy, and you need to get fan-made fixes (such as crime does not pay and opera house fix). The game's camera angle, a fixed trimeric (not isometric!), can make things difficult to see when you have lots of high-density buildings.

The game has interconnected regions where you can mix urban and rural together, build small farming towns or build a large metropolis—the transportation systems in this game rock. Build complex highways via Real Highway (using NAM), and you can drive vehicles. God mode is an exciting idea before crafting your city. There are advisors to yell at you. There's goofy messaging, a Mayor Rating and even riots (although extremely rare).

I only played about an hour in this game and am ready to come to a conclusion. It's bad. Horrible performance and shallow gameplay. I'm already bored. It's the same game with new things, whatever. I've already coughed out some sick looking at the future DLC roadmap for this game.

I thought SimCity (2013) had broken simulation, but Holey Moley, this game breaks it out with the water. Look at the other reviews, especially the top ones. At least in SimCity (2013), things somewhat work. Here, they are broken, like it will take ages to fix. CO and Paradox can't get away with this. An example of something odd is instead of using wealth and density to formulate taxing people. They used education levels. What? "Realistic simulation" is more like they haven't taken an economics class. There are tons more examples.

I still cannot believe they haven't fixed the zoning issues with the game. They slightly fixed the traffic and other issues like unrealistic buildings. They added modular buildings like in SimCity (2013), zoned areas for farms and sprinkled in some charm. The buildings look decent this time around.

But they rushed it, but at what cost? "They aimed it at 30 FPS." This game should've been delayed. It should've, but they chose not to. You know the performance is horrible when the devs need to show you a tutorial to improve the game's performance. Gamers Nexus and City Planner's video showed us how bad the performance is and was quoted by them as "the worst performance for a game tested this year". LGR's review reinforced more of the issues with the game. This is not acceptable as an $70NZD game.

I'm disappointed and going to go back to SimCity 4. Yes, the game has performance issues as it's old, but it's fun, at least. Ask me in a year or two whenever this game improves, and I'll update my review.