SimCity Creator

Overview

SimCity Creator follows the basic SimCity formula that sees players managing a city and placing residential, commercial, and industrial zones for buildings in addition to facilities such as police stations, hospitals, seaports, and stadiums. Players are also able to customize the look of their buildings by choosing from several themes for the city such as Egyptian, Roman, Japanese, European, Las Vegas, and near-future styles, in addition to ones that result in a crystal or confectionery-like appearance to buildings, along with unique soundtracks to go along with each theme. Players are also able to tour their city, rendered in 3D graphics, in a helicopter or airplane. If the player builds an airport, more touring vehicles can be unlocked. In contrast to the DS title of the same name, players are not able to greatly advance the technology of the city short of the examples above.

Taking advantage of the Wii, the pointer function of the Wii Remote is used to directly draw roads and train tracks onto the map. Cities can also be shared among players through WiiConnect24. The game's advisers have been redesigned to resemble MySims characters.

Similar to SimCity 4, SimCity Creator features a day and night cycle, as well as a seasonal cycle last seen in the SNES version of SimCity. Players may tackle disasters including dinosaurs, giant robots, tornadoes, aliens, fires, and meteorite impacts.

Zones

In SimCity Creator, areas can be zoned by the type of development and the density. There is also a landfill zone available which allows garbage to be stored. Each zone is color-coded:

This zone's buildings include houses for low-density zones and apartment towers and skyscrapers for higher-density zones.

Sims can work in stores and offices, and the commerce can be taxed. Offices are usually built on commercial medium or high density zones. Hotels and restaurants are sometimes built as well.

Sims may work here but it lowers land values and pollutes the air.

Transportation

Zones must be connected by lines of transportation. Some of the types of transportation choices for a city include roads and highways. Roads and streets are basic lines of transportation that cars, buses and trucks drive on. They can be either curved or straight. They can lead into each other to form crossroads or roundabouts. Heavy congestion can cause pollution above the affected road.

Highways are 4-lane roads. Cars travel faster on highways than roads or streets. However, they need on-ramps to function. You cannot build streets over rivers. However, building a road or railway over a river automatically creates a bridge.

Railways are what trains run on. However, they require train stations to work although they lower traffic congestion.

Subways are underground railways so they do not require buildings to be bulldozed, which makes it a more sensible choice for dense cities. They are more expensive to build than ordinary railways, about 8 in-game currency per tile, however, making it more sensible not to use them to link parts of your city that are far away from each other and do not have buildings in between them. Subway stations are also smaller than train stations, occupying a 1x1 square rather than a 3x3 square for regular stations. Subway stations are also easier to link to rails than ordinary railway stations.

Seaports are where boats stay. Seaports increase industrial demand.

Airports are where planes land. If an airport is built you will see planes, helicopter, airships and hot air balloons flying above your city, especially near the airport. Airports also raise commercial demand and enable several flight missions to happen.

Development

The game was first announced on February 12, 2008 by Sims label president Nancy Smith along with other upcoming EA Sim titles including SimAnimals, MySims Kingdom, and MySims Party.

Reception

The game has received mixed reviews, with a Metacritic ranking of 67 out of 100, based on 17 reviews. IGN gave the game an overall score of 5.9 or "Mediocre".