My favorite thing about SimCity has always been watching the rippling effects of my experimental choices. There have been eight bug-fixing updates since its infamous launch, and now all those many details work much more predictably — but it's been hard to get past that initial frustration. It's fitting, then, that its first expansion, Cities of Tomorrow, is looking toward the future. It's a new chance to showcase the intricacy and complexity of the simulation, and although it doesn't always feel new and can be somewhat underwhelming, it’s nicely balanced and improves upon the base game.
Cities of Tomorrow’s main additions are three futuristic city specializations: the Academy, OmegaCo, and MegaTowers. The Academy and OmegaCo serve to counteract each other, and it works really well — OmegaCo is an Orwellian, gratuitously polluting mega-corporation that slowly buys out your entire city, while the Academy is a green center for future technologies that help alleviate the problems of depleting resources and pollution. It’s all a bit dystopian, but then again, you’re an omnipotent CEO of a mayor with tyrannical eminent domain powers and control over pretty much everything (except traffic flow), so who are we to talk?
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