As someone who dumped a lot of time (and precious, precious money) into this game, and actively keeps up with it because SimCity is literally the first computer game I ever played and is the entire reason I am a PC gamer so I’d really like them to get it right, I think the game could theoretically be enjoyed offline @ $15 depending on what you want out of it. Right now, it’s decent at letting you quickly and easily create pretty-looking “glass bottle cities,” and you can probably make several of them before that stops being fun, if you find it fun at all.
The issues–aside from the much-discussed DRM and mod policy–are inherent to the simulation. Yes, city sizes are small (woefully so), but other vital components of the game, as a city sim, are broken or crazy. Citizens are not simulated at all beyond a low threshold. Yes, even though city sizes are massively restricted to let the poorly designed Glassbox engine not die in a fire, it still can’t keep up with the reported population figures, so it just sorta fudges it based on guesstimates of an increasingly small percentage of the population. As others have reported, even under the latest patch, utility vehicles just plain vanish and students will refuse to attend institutions, or attend ones that are wildly inefficient to get to. Intra-city communication is still haphazard at best, despite numerous patches claiming to fix it. I’m still personally of the opinion that traffic’s inherently broken, although it’s gotten better to the point that some people can play the game happily. And of course the entire central simulation mechanic is so utterly bizarre (the few sims that are actually tracked by the game don’t have set homes or jobs, they just make a mad rush toward open ones every “day” in the game) that I have a hard time enjoying the game as a useful city-planning sim.
At various points, logical errors in the game let ridiculous shit happen, like building successful residential only cities (no, I don’t mean using intra-city play to have a residential-only town feeding into an industrial town down the highway, I mean nothing but apartments and parks and wildly high–but unsimulated–population figures). Most if not all of these exploits have been cleared up, but this has had the unusual side effect of massively limiting the number of “viable” strategies for building high-density, successful cities–particularly since you’re constantly fighting against buggy game code that suddenly decides that it’s not going to pick up recycling anymore in your region where the entire economy is based around recycling. Again, you can make cutesey, pretty cities pretty easily, but if you want to do things like max population or income, I’d have to say that you just don’t have many options nowadays. Others might disagree with what constitutes “many,” in all fairness.
Not sure what kinda bug other people have up their ass for or against the game, but I say this as a man who’s loved SimCity games damn near his entire life as a sapient creature: SimCity failed on almost every level imaginable and here, almost a year later, few of its crippling problems have ever been fully corrected. That it had “slap in the face” online DRM that didn’t even work properly for weeks after release is enough to make me feel like shit for ever even buying it, but the fact that nothing else worked or was even fun for more than a couple of hours is just depressing as hell. There was so much potential here, and Maxis/EA blew all of it amid a storm of lies, arrogance, and stupidity.
