Reviews// Sim City Deluxe HD

This all sounds very slick until you actually use it in practice. There were times when I’d find the item I was trying to place on down was smaller than my index finger, making it hard to place it accurately. It’s also difficult to cancel out of drawing mode as you have to hit an icon in the main menu to cancel an action, otherwise it’ll dump whatever you messed around with on the screen.

It’s a nice try at utilising the iPad’s size of screen, but it doesn’t quite deliver and certainly fails to overcome the ‘hand-in-the-way’ syndrome many iOS games suffer from.

Zoo Loan
Simcity Deluxe HD comes with seven premade cities and scenarios that you can dive into to see how well you can turn the tide of impending disaster.

You can also create your own hamlet and build it up to into a vast metropolis that only you can read and understand for you made it happen. All of this is done with the aid of advisors who can be called upon to nudge the player in the right direction with regards to taxation and the ‘Sims’ well being.

All of their advice must be taken on board knowing that they are merely macros that are responding triggers brought about by various actions the player has enacted and thus fail to see the bigger picture.

For example, I took a loan out to buy a zoo and thus make the ‘Sims’ happy. While doing this did indeed make the citizens of my city content, my finance adviser chided me for such expenditure and declared it to be a waste of funds and a high risk measure.

What he failed to appreciate was that this increased the well being of the ‘Sims’ and were thus less inclined to flee the city due to higher taxes. A few moments later the same advisor was praising my tax management after we reaped a significant dividend for that month.

Attention
All of these intricacies make Simcity Deluxe HD so engrossing and does carry with it the risk of you playing the game until the iPad’s battery life is expended.

There is always something to look at and tend in the city you carefully nurture, and if things get a little hum-drum you can fire off a disaster such as an earth-quake and see how well your city recovers and rebuilds. The game just keeps on giving, provided you’re willing to offer it the attention it requires.

Simcity Deluxe HD uses graphical assets from [i]Simcity 4[/b]. This can be done thanks to the graphical horsepower of the iPad. The scrolling of the screen is also on full (there is no vanishing of the cityscape as you scroll around unlike the previous iPhone/iPod Touch version of the same game.) This adds much to the graphical splendour of the game and hence draws the player in even further.

Spot effects are excellent too, with environmental sounds blaring out depending on what part of the city the player is zoomed in on. Everything from the sports crowd fans yelling near a stadium to the car horns of a down-town commercial zone; it all adds texture to the city the player is building.

The music to the game is also excellent, with a mixture of jazz and classical thrown up to add atmosphere. One of the issues with the music however, is that the game would freeze for a moment as it changed to another track. A minor irritation that did begin to grate the longer I played the game. The player can choose to use the music that is held on their iPad, if they so choose, which is a nice touch...I mean addition. Sorry.

Conclusion
Simcity Deluxe HD is an engrossing and very entertaining game, much like its forebears only far worse so as it’s on a mobile platform. Now you can be glued to your precious city anywhere you have your iPad. Having said all of that, the game is not free from bugs however.

On many occasion during play it would behave erratically, with it freezing, scrolling across the screen very fast or even cutting off all of the sound. It does also have the tendency to crash back to the main screen of the iPad. My only advice to overcome this is to save often! There is also the complete lack of connectivity with the internet, which is very odd for an iPad game. We can only hope that is looked into for the sequel, assuming there will be one.

SPoNG Score: 73%