Just a few examples of what people were complaining about when SC4 first launched. Of course, that's not the whole review, which is positive overall.
- "It's too bad that some players will invariably get soured on the experience due to some of the bugs and the missing or underdeveloped features and options.".
- The game's camera can also be unusually unresponsive while you scroll around your city." Though you'll witness some incredibly detailed graphics at the closest zoom level, transitions between zoom levels are ungainly, and you'll see a mosaic effect gradually wash over the screen. Plus the game just runs sluggishly as you start to really build up, penalizing you rather than rewarding you for managing to build a big city. Crashes to desktop also aren't entirely uncommon, and graphical glitches crop up from time to time. At worst, the game might not even boot up-incompatibility with the anti-aliasing features of certain video cards can cause this to happen.
- "It also seems rather rushed, in that you'll likely run into obvious performance issues during play.
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Experienced SimCity players might also go in expecting to have numerous prebuilt cities available from the get-go, as well as stand-alone scenario options, but none of this is present in the game." The game also promises cooperative multiplayer support, but this isn't actually ready yet. " he MySim mode seems like an afterthought.The auto-roads feature really should have been optional." Plus all the extra roads can really hose your budget early on.
And since city maps in SimCity 4 are smaller overall than in previous SimCity games-probably a necessary limitation due to the fine level of detail you'll see down to individual houses and sims-that wasted space could be a big missed opportunity for your city. This is a mixed blessing, since these auto-built streets often don't line up as you try to construct adjacent zones, leaving your city with bits of wasted space here and there, at least until you get used to dealing with this feature. "SimCity 4 tries to make things even easier on you by automatically inserting streets, giving larger zones a gridlike pattern."However, due to the presence of some stability and performance issues, as well as a few noticeably lacking features, SimCity 4 doesn't seem as polished as it could have been.".