In 2013, a decade after the launch of SimCity 4, EA finally decided to reboot Maxis' famous city-builder—and it was a complete disaster. First impressions were good, however. The art style was particularly striking, using a depth of field effect to simulate the look of tilt-shift photography. You could drop the camera to street level and see individual sims wandering the streets. It was a beautifully presented game, which fooled a lot of people into thinking it was a return to form for the series. But it only took a few hours of play for the unfortunate truth to emerge.
There you were, happily building your city, then bam: you'd run out of space. Compared to the sprawling metropolises of previous sequels, cities in this new game were laughably tiny. You were confined to a small space, despite there being acres of empty green fields stretching into the distance around you. Your citizens would demand jobs, houses, and amenities, but you'd have no space to build them. All you could do was demolish existing buildings to make way for new ones, or start a new city and hit the same limits again in another few more hours.
This baffling design decision also stifled your creativity—which was especially unforgivable in a Sim game. With so little space to work with, you couldn't afford to get fancy or imaginative with your urban planning. Curved and circular roads were added to the game, a welcome and much requested feature, but building a grid-like city was always a more efficient use of space. At a certain point every city you built ended up looking basically the same: a perfect square of skyscrapers surrounded by empty land you inexplicably, frustratingly couldn't build on.
I did like the multiplayer region system, where friends could build cities alongside yours and you could trade resources. But the downside of this was that everything was stored in the cloud, not on your PC, which meant no saving or loading. Anyone who's played a SimCity game has almost certainly saved their city then triggered a disaster—a rampaging monster or a city-flattening tornado—just for the fun of it. Well, thanks to SimCity's cloud system that was no longer possible. Every decision you made was permanent, which again limited your creativity.
Bugs, server downtime, and a hollow simulation only added to the disappointment. At launch, traffic would always pick the shortest route to a destination—even if that meant ignoring an empty multi-lane freeway to clog up a tiny side road. If EA's servers happened to be overloaded—as they were, predictably, at launch—you simply couldn't play the game. And the more people studied the simulation, the less impressive it was. When returning from work, a sim would just drive to the nearest empty house. It looked great, but it was all smoke and mirrors.
SimCity was savaged by players and critics alike. The return of a series this beloved should have been something worth celebrating, but its reception was so poor that it led to the closure of Maxis' Emeryville studio. EA hasn't touched SimCity since, but that's fine: we have Cities: Skylines now, the game this reboot should have been. I had a hard time understanding why SimCity sucked so bad back in 2013, and all these years later that confusion has only grown. It was a low point for Maxis, but at least it redeemed itself with The Sims 4.