SimCity is Maxis's 2013 reinvention of the series that defined the city builder, rebuilt from the ground up on the GlassBox simulation engine. As Mayor you zone neighborhoods, lay roads, set the budget and keep power, water and services flowing, while every Sim in town lives a life of their own and lets you know exactly how you are doing.
A Living City Built on GlassBox
Where earlier SimCity games worked out your city in the background, GlassBox simulates it piece by piece in real time. Sims leave home for work, school and the shops, power, water and sewage travel along the road network, and fire engines, police cars and garbage trucks roll out from real stations to real addresses. The model-like look is more than a style choice: it keeps a busy city easy to read, so a traffic jam, a power shortage or a spreading fire is something you can watch unfold and trace back to its source.
Running the Show as Mayor
- Zoning and Roads
- Paint residential, commercial and industrial zones and let the city fill them in. The roads you choose shape everything that follows, since wider streets and avenues carry more traffic and allow denser, taller buildings to rise along them over time.
- City Hall and Departments
- As your population grows, City Hall expands with new departments that unlock better services, from stronger public safety and education options to transit and utility upgrades. Each addition opens up new ways to shape the kind of city you want to run.
- Data Maps and Your Sims
- Overlays for crime, pollution, land value, happiness and more show where the city is thriving and where it is struggling. Click on any Sim or vehicle to see where they are headed, and expect unhappy residents to let you know, right up to protests at your doorstep.
Specialize in What You Love
Once the basics are under control, your city can build its economy around a specialty, and the skyline changes to match.
- Mining and drilling: tap the coal, ore and oil beneath your land for quick money, and live with the pollution, heavy trucks and shrinking reserves that come with it.
- Trade and electronics: process raw materials into alloys, fuel and plastics, then move them through trade depots and ports, or build an electronics industry that turns those goods into high-value products.
- Gambling: build a strip of casinos to draw visitors and their money into town, while keeping a close eye on the crime that tends to follow the crowds.
- Education: invest in schools, a community college and a university to raise a smarter workforce, unlock higher-tech industry and set the city on a very different path.
Regions, Great Works and Disasters
No city stands alone. Each one sits in a region alongside neighboring plots, and cities can share services, sell power and water, and trade resources with each other. Invite friends to take the plots next door and pool your efforts on region-wide Great Works such as the Space Center, or play offline and run every city in a region yourself.
And when running things smoothly starts to feel too comfortable, you can bring the whole place down yourself. Tornadoes, flaming meteors, fires, giant monsters, destructive robots and even a zombie horde are all waiting, whether you want to test your emergency services or simply watch the chaos.
Your first city will probably end up with a traffic problem, a sewage problem and a downtown full of unhappy Sims, and working out how to fix all three is exactly the fun. Pick your plot, lay that first road and start building the city you want to run.
