Gamespot: SimCity Societies First Impressions SimCity Societies First Impressions - Urban Renewal for a Famous Franchise The SimCity franchise gets rebooted with SimCity Societies, a game that tosses out much of the legacy gameplay and starts over from scratch. Before The Sims arrived on the scene and dominated PC game sales charts, Maxis' key franchise was SimCity, the iconic city-building game. As a mayor in SimCity, you have to balance all the needs of a city. For instance, the citizens want houses and jobs; businesses need an educated workforce; industry requires workers and infrastructure; and more. However, as anyone who has played SimCity and its sequels knows, trying to incorporate all these needs into a single city is a huge challenge. Of course, meeting that challenge is the rewarding part of the game. While this formula has served the series for almost two decades, it's about to get a big overhaul. More than four years have passed since the last SimCity game was released, and that's an epoch in computing terms. So EA and Maxis recently announced a new SimCity game, but it's one that's completely unlike any of its predecessors. SimCity Societies will be the first SimCity game that's not developed directly by Maxis. Instead, work on the game is being done primarily by Tilted Mill, the developer of city-building games Caesar IV and Children of the Nile. As such, Tilted Mill brings an outside perspective to SimCity, and that has translated to a fresh new angle to the series. And in many ways, SimCity Societies feels like a reboot of sorts for the franchise. You can read the entire Gamespot preview here.
