Sim City 4: Rush Hour

Sam takes a look at the final piece in the Sim City jigsaw.

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By my guestimate SimCity has to be the longest running series on the PC. The man who would eventually destroy the goodwill he'd built up over the years with those abominations The Sims first burst onto the scene in 1989. Fourteen years and over 20 million sales later and the newest release is on us, the uber-patch that is Rush Hour. I say patch because with the exception of the U-Drive-It sections there's a very persuasive argument that it's only with the features added in this pack that Sim-City 4 itself becomes a complete game.

As the title suggests, Rush Hour concerns itself with the business of getting your Sims from their homes to their jobs and back again. To these ends a wealth of new transport options are available as well as a comprehensive and extremely useful traffic query tool to aid you in tracking the origins of your gridlock. In addition there is a healthy collection of new structures to plonk down in your city, along with some tantalising rewards. How does a space port sound? There are also new building styles on offer. From 1890s Chicago, 1930s New York, 1990s Huston through to a modern European building set, the aesthetic side of SC4 has been improved, not that the looks of the original ever rose many serious complaints. In a nice touch you can select which style you prefer or have them rotate over a set number of years, an affect that brings an increased level of uniqueness to your creation. Then there's the U-Drive-It feature. Here you can actually drop into the driving seat of one of a large number of vehicles and zoom around your city in a fashion similar to the original GTA. Without the murdering. There are incentives in the shape of reward buildings to at least have a play with this, and it's nice to be able to get down to city level and mingle with your peons. Hell, you can even taint your game with those contemptible Sims to the point of assigning them vehicles to potter around in. Fortunately you can take or leave this part of Rush-Hour so you can either get pleasantly distracted with the varied missions or banish the markers from the screen and knuckle down to the city-building.

Firing up an old city with a reasonable population of 125,000 I started to think of the ways I could get the traffic moving again by dropping in some of the new transport options. A monorail seemed a nice proposition but would require some demolition. As would implementing almost all of the new features. Just as in SC4 you really must plan well ahead for the transport needs of your city if you want to avoid some serious demolition work. This was something I couldn't be arsed with, so I decided to start anew. But before I did this I had a good scan around my old town to see what differences, if any, the expansion had wrought. By utilising the traffic query tool, which i was already beginning to fall in love with, I could see where my pedestrians were congregating and where my trains were taking the burden. I could tell which roads were used heaviest for the morning commute and which for the journey home. The tool also breaks down the usage of each tile of road, rail, etc into which mode uses them the heaviest. So, for example, I can click on a piece of road to discover that 900 passengers travel by car and 600 by bus with a measly ten folk pounding the pavements. When a building is selected in this mode it will tell you how many commuters there are and paint out colour-coded lines to show you where they all go. In a nutshell, this new tool makes a massive difference to how well you can manage your cities and left me with the feeling that it's omission in SC4 was either a criminal oversight or a cynical ploy to shift an expansion pack just like this a few months down the road.

Starting up my new city I made extensive use of the new avenues. Finally after well over a decade, players can lay down dual-carriage ways! Handy they are too; they can even be upgraded to ground level then elevated highways. Although I couldn't get my Sims to use the new parking garages in any sort of capacity-stretching number I left space for some rail based action later on while trying to set up as integrated a scheme as I could fathom. While waiting for my city to fill up enough to warrant the placement of a monorail I came to appreciate the space saving effect for the new consolidated buildings. There are massive schools and hospitals and big fire and police stations which may cost a lot to build and run but make it much easier to keep an eye on your staffing levels. They also save a good bit of space in a crowded city. There are no new beautification lots nor are there any new city ordinances but if you have a big city you will come to love the large water pump, sloshing out gallons on the cheap. There are a healthy number of new buildings and rewards in here and they all have a useful function. But if new lots are all you're after I recommend that you head over somewhere like Simtropolis.com who host a severopolis full of new and modded buildings. Some of the user creations are so good that they should be included in the game as standard.

The performance routines appear to have been tweaked as the whole enterprise ran smoother with less visual quakes then it did before. Still, getting a city up to truly commanding sizes will have you reaching for the details slider in an attempt to keep things moving along. The new additions have the unfortunate side effect of slightly clogging up the toolbars, but this is a minor niggle. All in all, with the inclusion of Rush Hour, SC4 is a tidy and stable game, so if you like ranting at a game because it won't work on your system you should probably look elsewhere.

If, on the other hand, you love to while away hour after hour watching buildings hove into view as your city boundaries constantly encroach on the wildlife, without ever having to expose your delicate skin to the elements, SC4 Rush Hour is the thing to get. It retains all the charm and addictiveness of the original titles while chucking in enough new toys to make it worth the asking price. If you haven't bought SC4 on its own the two can be had for a good price in a deluxe edition. Deluxe or expansion, SC4 RH is a fine continuation of a venerable series.

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By Sam Gibson