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City Life World Edition Renovated City |
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Sunday, 01 July 2007 |
City Life: World Edition is a curious product, an expanded rerelease of 2006's City Life, a critically acclaimed city simulator that showed great promise but tacked a certain je ne sois quoi. World Edition's changes to the original game are—relative to your average expansion pack—minor...but their effect on the game is magical, transforming it into the kind of mesmerizing lever-pulling life-suck that sim junkies crave.
With the recent drought of city Sims, it's little wonder that City Life stirred souls. thanks to its interplay of infrastructure and class warfare. Cities had to be carefully structured with social classes separate enough to avoid conflict but close enough to serve each other's needs. The premise was disarmingly engaging, but the charm dimmed quickly, the same formula worked on every map. Variations in topography, tourist appeal, and environment didn't make things challenging enough to warrant building the same city all over again.
World Edition remedies this by correcting a seemingly superficial flaw: the gorgeous but anemic selection of buildings. With only a handful of business buildings for each class, neighborhoods became monotonous stretches of identical storefronts; World Edition adds dozens of new buildings—employers, leisure destinations, service structures, and 15 real-world landmarks and an accessible building editor for designing and adding even more.
Turns out, more variety is just what City Life needed. The game's fit and finish is still marred by a litany of bush-league typos (the gaming equivalent of the boom mic in the frame), but these nitpicks shouldn't keep city-game lovers from paying this City a visit. |
Games 