A highly enjoyable city sim game with great depth but lacks a little involvement once you learn the ropes.
The scenario you're placed in is a fantastic idea (small banana republic torn between capitalism and communism) and gives your small towns a personal feel rather than just a mass of housing in a giant metropolis. Essentially you're a poor nation building up a small island to become a global success through tourism or commerce. What's great is that each individual on that island is a real person, they are what you'd call an actual Sim, with needs, families and personalities. Your main aim in the game is to please these sims and you can view each one and what they're upto by clicking on them or completely ignore them and play the game like you would simcity, the choice is yours.
The Good: The game has excellent depth, choosing how to run your country, what style, what commerce, what faction to concentrate your efforts on, how much to pay semi-skilled, skilled workers, immigration, religion etc. The game also rewards good town planning & structure in the later stages. It has some excellent choice of what they call endicts where you can advertise for tourism, setup social security or ask for aid. You can fight rebel armies, setup secret police and even assasinate trouble makers. And I never tire from the commentary over the radio.. the guy's hilarious, from one liners such as 'Breaking news....A llama has made a successful assasination attempt on the El Presidentes hat' and 'A neighbouring island has reported it's raining frogs.... and sadly cows; our El Presidente says it's better that than raining men!'. The graphics are excellent on my 5770, interface easy to use and haven't had one crash in over 100 hours of play.
You can setup avatars that give you bonuses for certain levels which is a nice touch.
The Bad: The main gribe about the scenarios is that many are too easy while others frustrating. Games can end just like that if you get it wrong through invasion or uprising. Keeping all the factions happy is difficult to start with because you dont know the ropes but once you do learn to manage them it's far easier.
With all that depth it sometimes really lacks some statistical information about what's going on, whats profitable, what's not. Your main source of transporting goods is through what's called teamsters. It's impossible to find out if they're working efficiently, you can't assign zones for them, goods seem to picked up randomly when the town gets bigger etc. The transport system is bizarre where you have to put huge garages up that basically work as a taxi service for the sims so they get to places quicker.
On the whole though the game tends to lack any micro management later in the game. Once you start making a profit, built the church, clinic, army base and school to keep the factions happy enough not to revolt it's pretty striaght forward from there. The depth is there but you don't need to use it most the time. Just keep an eye on unemployment, housing and food production and just build when you can afford it. Perhaps make some buildings age so need replacing, keep busier with election campagins etc. It's a shame because the elections could be a big aspect to the game. As they are it's far too easy to win an election by a landslide even when you're doing really badly. They could make it so elections are a big aspect to the game, where you have to really campaign to win them because if you can't win there's always another route which leads me to another gribe. They have these commumist or dictator routes you can go down but no point do you ever need to. I never once had to rig an election or 'remove' opposition voters or opposition even.
I also found there to be a big difference in difficulty when trying to go down the tourist routes. Commerce is easy, you build farms, when you can afford you start building cigar/perfume factories etc. Tourism seems alot harder especially in the first years when you're starting out and you always end up having to build up commerce to try and subsidise the tourist industry.
I think this game would benefit greatly if they sat down and thought how can we force the player to get more involved in the gameplay. There's great depth there but not enough involvement. Getting players to manage the army (dealing with rebels) transport, elections and goods haulage more would make the game so much better.
I'm looking forward to the new updates and will probably buy them at a later date. If you like City Sim games you'll prob love this.