Gracie Leach writes:
"Anyone familiar with the SimCity franchise knows that the basic formula for success in all of these games involves zoning, budgeting and landscaping. Unfortunately, even these sure-fire features cannot save SimCity Creator from its fate as something that resembles a budget title on an end-cap at Staples.
There are several modes of play to experience and we chose to begin with the Challenge mode. The tutorial, narrated by an anime-looking character, offers no interaction, and after reading our little friend's lines, we were shuttled off to the first era challenge without a chance to demo our new abilities.
The first era of our experience, named The Dawn of Civilization, found us in control of a hunter-gatherer society making a transition to agriculture. In the Challenge mode, you begin with only a few construction options, such as laying animal paths and zoning for agriculture or commercial and residential buildings. As you progress through eras, including the Industrial Revolution and The Renaissance, more aspects of the game become available."
Vooks writes: "Who can honestly say that they've never heard of any of the Sim games? I remember when I was in primary school that heaps of kids used to play SimAnt, a game where you actually create an ant colony and watch it flourish. I thought the concept was bizarre but still pretty unique, and wondered where the series would go from there. Sim City Creator is the second Sim City game for the Nintendo DS, and is nothing like the Wii version of the same name. What Sim City Creator does, however, is put a very interesting twist on an already (very) well established formula."
GI writes: "As my fingers struggled with the unnecessarily confining plastic wrap that surrounded my copy of SimCity: Creator for the Wii, I felt a subtle shudder tremble through me. I was holding in my hands not just a mere video game; no ... I was holding in my hands digital godhood."
WorthPlaying writes: "In 2007, Electronic Arts sought to reclaim the legacy and money-making capabilities of its SimCity franchise by saying goodbye to the modern age of gaming and traveling back to 1999. SimCity DS was pretty much a port of SimCity 2003, which in turn was really only a slight update of SimCity 2000. The endless complication of the sprawling sandbox that is a SimCity game didn't hold up quite as well as it did back in 1993, and EA must have realized that the franchise was in need of a serious reboot.
Enter SimCity Creator for the NDS, a game that still holds onto all the relics of the early-'90scity simulator but adds something that the original creators never thought of: a learning curve. For the first time ever, your SimCity travels through time, and you have to build it up from a collection of huts by a river into a hunter-gatherer society, an agrarian monarchy, and then you have to work it up into the modern age and keep it thriving. Each new age you reach gradually introduces its own set of challenges, and with it, the game finally feels like it has a purpose other than frustrating you with minutiae."
