Recent reviews by Kemonodad

Its almost easier for this to make like a Warner Bros film and just become a tax write off at this rate, I just want to forget about this game and pretend it doesn't exist. Go play CS1 or SC4. Even 2013 at this point. At least SimCity 2013 has good music and charm.

A great game for bisexuals

EDIT 2: I am actively experiencing new bugs regularly so im probably missing some
TLDR for those wanting "quick" points-

Pros:
+can look pretty from some angles and settings
+new road tools are the best part
+progression system is neat (but only the points system, actual progression sucks)
+has an initial enjoyment
+some fun small details, cars doing 3 point turns with reverse lights, etc
-semis still clip through themselves
+volumetric clouds do look pretty!
+the music is good!
-ads and hosts repeat themselves often and too frequently. also hardly any songs IN those stations. they repeat fast.
+the new zoning types are also nice

Cons:
-unfinished game
-runs quite bad, and changes wildly depending on system hardware
-settings made fps worse
-parks are almost always empty
-AI still sucks at higher pops
-an overabundance of visual bugs, things loading and unloading in front of me regardless of distance and never sharpening back up
-cars have orange windows from a distance
-ray tracing turns cars fuzzy when they move
-balancing isnt great
-no real punishment for maxing out taxes?
-the economy is made up and fake
-industry zones suck, no other way around it, the weird (or lack) of texture variation and random building placement sucks and looks weird
-Ultimate Edition does not include any actual expansions, just assets and radios
-Tornado textures are a joke and thats putting it mildly. At least its not just a spinning repeating smoke texture like in the early trailers
-for touting how you should support local business and industry, the lack of trucks, vans, etc let alone planes or boats or trains having those brands on them feels like a miss.
-the most colorful things in this game are the cars and even thats unrealistic in this day and age
-ships feel comically too large, and having to build these insanely tall bridges that dont look great doesnt help
-terrain tools are a joke
-devs and community need to stop making excuses for performance as a game in 2023 at minimum should be able to hit 30fps let alone 60
-buying a new GPU should be factored into the game price at this rate
-for also gloating about no population cap it seems the game cant even handle 50k for me
-insane amount of land is rendered outside of the visible play area, even if low poly
-no shared bus/taxi and traffic roads and same with bicycles
-theres almost a lack of ambient sounds? feels ironically almost too quiet compared to CS1 which I think doesnt help with it feeling empty
-locations dont seem to make sense for maps. Barrier Island is North American themed and vaguely resembles NYC yet its in the southern hemisphere?
-map variety is pretty boring
-LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS OF VISUAL BUGS

EDIT 1 OF MORE NEGATIVE CRAP HAPPENING:

So after playing a bit more, the cloud layer that exists above the volumetric clouds (still don't get why they even exist if they don't move) started going faster and faster to the point that if you have epilepsy I would not recommend the game until this is fixed ESPECIALLY. It causes rapid flashing during the daylight hours from the shadows and they only stop moving after the game has been paused for a solid bit. My session was ended by the game crashing when placing a building then it soft locked my computer because it still thought it was running. I also eventually tried to lower the graphics after 10k population because it became substantially worse, but it didn't fix fps! Performance definitely got worse the more I keep playing.

I can also sufficiently say the terrain tools SUCK. The flattening tool doesn't pick the point at which you clicked from and stick with it, if you move the mouse too quick it WILL snap to the next elevation, up or down. Every other game can seem to get this right.

The economy? Seemingly made up. I maxed out residential tax to 30% and got constant single family home demand indefinitely. CO made mention that they changed the hourly money ticker to up/down arrows because it "isnt important to know how much you're making" but I believe its to hide the fact it just doesn't work at all. Consistently would go from -40k an hour to -1,000 in minutes of just sitting there and doing nothing. Once I backed off my insane taxes the game thought I should've been losing 1 MILLION per month and yet my money kept going up.

Parks stay empty while random apartment blocks will have about 40 people doing yoga in the front yard, insane that pedestrian paths exist but you cant place parks on them.

Traffic AI was the biggest letdown as my city got bigger (about 50k). They do exactly the same crappy moves as the first game after a certain point and still consistently pick the shortest route rather than the quickest leading to impossible to solve backups even with using almost all of the transit available to me minus trams.

I would also consistently have tunnels filled with water when placing them. Be it roads or trains. My biggest gripe with transit is if you want to use ships you better have thought about unlocking every single tile in the ocean then manually connect everything back up. Good luck if you already built them and then have to wait for the next milestone just to use them. Not sure why we need to create routes to giant ugly floating arrows at the map edges. Same with airports.

I appreciate that there are small details in this game that do make it fun but the game itself feels lifeless and bland (dare I say repetitive) after 15 hours. I want to see my Cims doing things. Feels like more effort was put into all these "unique buildings" (the ones that can only be plopped once) and graphics that dont even work well and small details most will never see; than anything that matters.

Unrelated to playing the game itself and more of an overall critique, im quite annoyed and disappointed to see the only actual "expansion" we are getting is.... bridges and ports... everything in the Ultimate Edition is just asset fodder and radio stations, and id argue bridges and ports arent new gameplay features like an expansion should be, so just dont buy it. Its already a crime that the DLC individually + the game itself it will cost you $165 if and when they do that. Seems were getting the Victoria 3 treatment of being given a game devoid of features but immediately dumping out DLC. Paradox greed knows no bounds since they also seem to keep f-ing up Stellaris gameplay too. But I digress.

Dont buy this currently. Give it 6 months. Minimum.

I desperately wanted to like this, cause the Crash Modes were always my favorite things about the Burnout games. This is absolutely nothing like that. The controls are jank, changing graphics settings refused to keep it in full screen mode, and pressing enter (at any time) would take it out of full screen. The lack of volume settings either doesn't help things. One of the things I loved from Burnout was the replay feature to be able to watch back at the chaos, and unless im missing something, that is entirely absent and doesn't really feel like you get to relish in all the chaos you're causing like you used to be able to. So if you want to buy this go in the mindset that its more of a pet project than anything substantial, because it feels like a lot of basic things are missing to make it more than just something to mess around with for half an hour.

The base game itself is pretty alright, but modding is where this game shines. Want a certain theme? You got it. Want an oddly specific number of European and American vehicles? Bam! Want to form an addiction with making sure you have the right number of pine trees in your park? This is the game for you! The amount of things you can do because of the modding community is astronomical, but do be warned, organize your mods so you don't have to spend ages figuring out why a plant causes your game to crash :'D