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Before we start, a brief caveat- I have always been a Sim City fan. I am not a fanatic, but I have owned just about every release, even the one for SNES and I was really excited for it to come out on the DS.

I though the Nintendo DS version of Sim City was going to be excellent. As in, the ideal game for the way I use my DS- when commuting and traveling and trying to kill some time while doing something that is interesting, fun, and (that makes me feel) productive. Previous versions of Sim City had always satisfied me in these always and I have always been relatively happy with the newer versions of the game.

Well, this was not at all the case with Sim City DS.

What sucks- 

While the game adapts well to the use of the DS’ stylus, the fundamental problem is that it is asks too much of the system. This can be seen in a number of ways, each of which contributes to this game overall being pretty bad. First of all, you can only save one city. Just one city! So you can’t start a city, save it, try a crazy idea, and save it as YourNameVille II or work on two cities at once, or even save a really cool old city. Other evidence of a lack of robustness from the DS (something that no other game I have played has a problem with) can be seen in how the game takes about 30 second to save.

Next, the controls. The reliance on the stylus is fine, commendable even, but given the small size of the display it can be very difficult to make the accurate commands that are needed (this is near impossible when traveling on a bus). Luckily there is an undo button which you will become very familiar with, but you can’t undo demolitions and it is annoying to have to do so many things twice.

Thirdly, the game has constant interruptions. Every few minutes you are always to shoot fireworks or to attending a meeting (which is generally the same as the previous month’s).

Fourth- you can’t control the start date so you are stuck are the most basic level or building options (this used to be called year 1900). You don’t even have buses, highways, or solar power or any of the things that were fun to build a city around.

Fifth- when you are building the time is automatically paused. This was actually the detail that made me stop playing the game. It means you have to build, watch the city grow, then build while the city is paused, and so on. It makes getting from year 1900 onwards extremely tedious.

Sixth- the city does not look that good. The DS’ normally excellent graphics look terrible because the cities are packed with all those buildings

Seventh- the graphing and analytics tools are very limited. You can no longer really examine the city the way you once did.

Eight- there are no hills. That’s right, the boards are totally flat except for some trees and water. This was just ridiculous, plus you lose the challenge of building on a hilly landscape, there are no tunnels, and the maps boring plains, and you can’t use any of the cool bulldozer tools to raise or lower lands. Actually, there is one thing you can do bulldoze water. Yes, it cost’s $7 a square (an acre?) to bulldoze that stupid river in the middle of your map.

What doesn’t suck-

Come on, it’s Sim City. On the DS. That’s got to count for something. And it does. If you just want to casually burn some time here and there without any regard for the old games, it’s not that bad.

Next, it’s great that there is no plumbing to deal with. This was always something that people argued over with the newer Sim City games- the plumbing, was expensive, annoying, and unrewarding. Personally I did not mind in and thought it added another element to designing a city, but it was tedious at times.

Ultimately Sim City DS is not worth the time or money. It could have been a perfect title for the DS but I found out that hard way that this implementation of Sim City was not well done and that the game is simply not suited for playing on small screens and portable systems. For this reason the developers are not totally to blame here, but they made a lot of poor decisions when it came to the game play, the look of the city, the zoom controls, the inability to save multiple cities, and the features that are unique to the DS version.

From what I have read, most reviews are sympathetic to the attempt to bring Sim City to the DS and they take it slightly easy on the game, but when it comes down to it, this is a failed attempt. If you want to play Sim City on the go get a notebook and a version of Sim City 4. If you have a DS and you simply need to buy Sim City, I would say, limit your expectations, get a comfortable stylus, and try to be as patient as possible.

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