It might look like SimCity, but it plays more like a Zynga game than most SimCity fans will be comfortable with.
EA
When I heard that EA was promoting its new SimCity Social spin-off with the tagline "More City, less Ville," I hoped against hope that the game might actually break the deeply entrenched, deeply annoying social gaming mold set by Zynga's ultra-popular, ultra-simple Facebook games like FarmVille. It's hard to think of an established, well-respected gaming franchise with more potential to bring a bit of deep simulation, complex strategy, and gameplay variety to the world of popular Facebook games.
After playing around with the SimCity Social beta for a few days now, though, I'm a little gobsmacked by how much that potential has been wasted. Given how satisfied the game is to ape the conventions set by Zynga's CityVille without adding any significant gameplay elements from its namesake, the tagline "More City, less Sim" would probably be more accurate for SimCity Social.
Like other SimCity games, Social gives players a relatively free hand to contract their cities with their own preferred mix of housing, businesses, and industry. Here, though, the decisions end up being more cosmetic than really meaningful to the city's operation. In any other SimCity game, each decision would be laden with consequences and tradeoffs that ripple down through a series of interrelated systems: More industrial zoning might mean more jobs and taxes, but also more pollution and crime; a fire station might help protect the citizens, but also place a drain on a limited budget.
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