Sim City (5) PC Review

I am writing this in a response to a huge juxtaposition there is to the people who actually bought the new Sim City (release 3/5/2013, yesterday) and are reviewing it fairly and accurately and the very small number of actual critics that seem to have glanced about the game with no more than "it is a pretty and polished" attitude.

In June I read about a new sim city coming out and I was extremely excited about it.  I went online and looked for beta testing options, but found nothing at the time.  Over the months I searched, I did find beta test sign ups and I was hoping to be chosen like everyone else.  To my dismay I was chosen for "beta test" but it was less than a month ago, which means that the game is already finished more or less and no major changes were going to be made, so no matter what I find or do as a beta tester it means nothing unless it is a glitch of some sort.

To give a short overview of the "beta test" (I put "beta test" in quotes because it was not a beta test it was more of a hype test) it was fine at first, but the server kicked you out after playing an hour and you had to start over again from scratch each time.  I figure ok not a big deal lets see what I can do in 60 min.  NOTHING, on normal speed, the only way to get a city quick was to change to cheetah speeds immediately and try to keep up with the play.  There was no region access so you had to work with the 2k by 2k area to build a self sufficient city, which is interesting considering the game play requires city interaction.  After a few cities (and hours, the shinyness wore off) I noticed that it was very easy to make a city that was making money.  It started to feel like sim city 'easy mode'.  In all my years of playing the sim cities on PC I always had to put real thought into getting my city up correctly so it would make money, not so much in this beta.  I found that I had to actively TRY to fail in building this city and the first time I tried to fail, I failed at failing.  Apparently, a city with only commercial and residential works, oddly enough.  So when I crashed and burned with residential and industrial only I was happy for a moment but sad that the challenge seemed to be partially if completely gone.

The servers went down for a good chunk of time over the beta test weekend (I think it was nearly a full day) so I spent some time reading the forums seeing what others had said about the game.  I found out that other long time sim city fans were saying a lot about the fact that the beta was constricted in certain ways.  A lot of the forums said most if not all of what people who actually bought the game are saying now.  You still had the fan boys that love any sim city but I was glad to read that the veterans had a lot to say too with more depth in their reviews.

After the beta was over I decided NOT to pre-order a game for $60-$80.  Looks like I was right not to after reading the reviews of the people that actually bought it and had to wait in 235 min ques to play a game that is largely single player.  That is of course assuming that they were even able to download it.  I think it is a bit stupid if not insane to pay $60 for something you can't play at the time of transaction in this day and age.

As it stands right now on metacritic.com the user reviews stand at an overall 2.7 with 182 positive reviews and 575 negative.  While on the same website the meta score based on 8 critics responses is 91.  Now, I am not but a humble sysadmin gamer, but theres something wrong with those numbers.  In fact one of the only reviews that I came across on my googleing that I thought gave a good over all view of the situation was IGN on their ongoing experience with the game so far, found here.

My advice so far on this game is buyer beware, it is not a good model for this type of game.  I do NOT condone pirating this game in any way, however I am interested (from a curiosity standpoint) to see what the pirates will do with this title if anything.