Well, SimCity Societies Destinations should now be available for Digital Download, as well as packed in with The SimCity Box in a retail store near you. How does it rate? Well…not looking good according to 1Up…
Sadly, though, urban planning isn’t the greatest challenge the series faces. In spite of five patches and this expansion, Societies still suffers from the occasional crash, slowdown issues when cities get large, and a totally inadequate zoom-out range (likely artificially induced to help mask the framerate problems). Since the graphics engine is more Prius than Corvette, it boggles the mind how the dev team can go through this many iterations and still have such a staccato game.
Anyway, other than the “Come to Lovely Simtopia!” angle, Societies remains the same as always, expansion or no. Your resident Sims can’t visit any of the tourist venues (although vacationers don’t face equivalent restrictions with normal buildings), so you’ve still gotta build your burg along pretty much the same lines and with pretty much the same tools you have always used — only now you have to leave some space for tourist stuff. Many new buildings (and new gameplay modes) are already available in free patches, so if you’re not interested in Destinations’ vacationing layer (which, to be fair, adds another honest-to-goodness challenge to the game), you don’t really need to drop another 30 bucks — unless you really, really missed that monster-attack disaster.
