I had kind of decided that I wasn't meant to play any of the Simcity games because I have played quite a few and never even been able to generate enough money to get me out of debt. Many, many bank loans later I find myself giving up on the whole idea of playing. That held true back when I played on Super Nintendo and it held true on the PC release of Simcity 2000. This game changed my opinion in a few ways.

SimCity Societies is by far the easiest Simcity game ever made. I played for about 8 hours the day I bought it and left it unattended for about 3 hours of that and had no major problems and had an almost 2 million simolean surplus. Unfortunately my laptop has a hard time running it, but my desktop ought to run it fine. I should be able to fill the entire buildable area and let it run for a week or two straight and have a trillion dollar surplus easily.

I didn't have any powerplant failures, which is good because I was running three nuclear power plants, along with about 20 windfarms and some trashincinerators and some other things I can't quite remember the name of.

My crime rate at one point reached high, but I got it back down to medium, my pollution level at one point was high, but I demolished a super coal plant and replaced it with 2 of the Nuke plants.

Everything in the game can be filtered to your wants at the time. Some of the structures require a certain level of creativity, or spirituality or some other thing like that to operate or to be built and you can filter based off of those same values or you can filter the entire building menus by different characteristics you want to have in your town like fun, industrial, authoritive.

You can build a clown school among other things and it has a special event called mimegeddon. When you use mimegeddon the clown school releases hundreds of mimes which roam the streets. You can build movie theatres and have premeires or build a big fancy movie theatre and have world premeires, open drama schools and have events there, movie sets, burger joints, temples, churches, behavior control facilities and so much more.

I really enjoyed the game, despite the laptop having such a hard time with it.

I have an update since I wrote this review originally. I did install it on my desktop, well my old desktop anyway, and found it running worse than on my laptop despite the specs being almost twice as beefy. I also discovered when trying to get it running right that a ton of people are having the same issues. Apparently the title was rushed and not properly tested. That's why I am giving SimCity Societies three stars.