Sim City Societies set to hit mobile in impressive fashion
And, thankfully, it's much less fiddly than SimCity
If you're a keen PC gamer, you might be aware of the upcoming release of SimCity Societies, which takes more of a focus on social and cultural behaviour. Anyway, it's also getting a mobile version, which is arriving in the next fortnight.
We were invited down to EA's HQ in Chertsey last week to take a look. The game follows last year's SimCity, which we liked, but was a bit on the fiddly side on a mobile handset.
"SimCity was a little bit more hardcore, but SimCity Societies is appealing more to the massmarket," says European Product Manager Tim Carter. "We're trying to make it more accessible for mobile people."
So, this is more scenario based, with you taking over a city that's already laid out. Your job is to bring people into the city, and making sure you have a happy society.
The game uses a neat icon-based interface that's significantly easier to navigate than SimCity's. Rather than get too sucked into the micro-management, it's more about judging and changing the mood of your citizens so as to keep your public sweet. What's more, this affects how the game actually looks.
"The game dynamically changes over time," says Carter. "If you start putting down big coal mines and police stations everywhere, it'll become more authoritarian, and the graphics will change and become darker. Whereas if you put down football fields and cinemas, everyone will be happy and it'll look brighter. It all happens in real-time while you're playing."
One feature we like is the way every building affects your population in different ways – so some will make them happy but increase pollution, while others might improve health while sapping power. It's also the first game where you've got the outright option to build 'slum housing'. Perish the thought that this happens in the real world.
"We've been working very closely with the PC studio on the mobile game," says Carter. "So we're using the same game logic, and taken the building assets and recreated them for mobile."
We'll be reviewing SimCity Societies next week, so click 'Track It!' for our final verdict.
