Hold on to your processors, Sim City 4 continues to eat up your resources with its new expansion. Ok, I’m exaggerating a little bit… but honestly it’s the one thing I’ve always found about Sim City games is that my computer is just not quite up to speed with how much stuff I put into the city. Processor-hogging aside, Sim City4’s Rush Hour expansion gives an entertaining twist to the original game by adding missions based on your driving skills around your own city. So much for putting all those fancy curves in your roads, because you’re going to have to try to maneuver in them!
There are also many new tools and road options at your disposal to manage your transportation needs. They’ve also re-incorporated some of your old favorite features, such as setting a city difficulty setting (easy, medium, hard) and labeling your neighborhoods with signs. This time you can even label the streets, though the names can be tricky to read as they are superimposed onto the street itself.
New road options, such as one-way roads, avenues, and even monorails, add to your already complex transportation system. Out of all the factors in running a Sim City, transportation seems to be one of the most difficult to master. I’ve hardly ever had a largely populated city without traffic problems. Well, it is Sim City, which is supposed to mimic real life, and trust me I’ve had my share of traffic in the big city! The new tools to manage your traffic give you a better clue as to where your problem spots are, such as being able to see the amount of congestion as a quantitative value, plus differences in morning commute and evening commute. Probably my favorite new addition is the avenue, which gives you even more road capacity than a road, but basically takes up two tiles. The good part is that unlike highways you don’t need on-ramps or off-ramps so it doesn’t take up more space than you might want to give up.
The biggest change in this expansion is the implementation of the “U-Drive-It” mission system. Instead of just the plain getting rewards when you have a certain amount of population growth, you have to earn many rewards and new buildings by accomplishing certain tasks by driving around your town, whether you are just another car, a police squad car, or even running the railroad or helicopters. This is where I ran into the biggest graphic problems – because you are actually able to crash into other cars (you get a “life” meter and if you crash too much you fail), you should be able to actually SEE the other cars, but I experienced a good amount of graphic glitches where the cars would flicker in and out (including mine). Plus sometimes it actually lags so one second I’m on the street and the next second I’m on someone’s lawn. It’s difficult enough that you need to try to steer your way around the town, in the same view that you have overhead, and your perspective doesn’t change as you turn. It’s kind of like you’re playing with match cars but you have to use the arrow keys to maneuver them, which can take some getting used to (think power steering, not manual). Some of the missions are easy enough, but it is heavily dependent on how you lay out your city. Try straight roads, not too many turns to make things less of a headache. My favorite missions are the ones where I drive the school buses, and whenever you crash into something the children cheer in delight like they are on a rollercoaster (because that’s what happens in real life, right?)
Anyway, if your computer can handle this game, and you can deal with the unconventional method of getting rewards, definitely buy this expansion. Actually I’d get it just for all the added features, and many features that I missed from previous versions of Sim City. They must actually listen to their fans, I wonder how many game companies can claim to do that well?