Very good part to play with design related party pooper

First, the obvious: The release of SC was a disaster. For days it was hardly possible to connect to the servers. Permanent crashes and bugs have not only tarnished the pleasure to SC but also made completely impossible. And even if the game was left the regular crashes the server constantly uneasy question whether the city, to which one has spent the last hours, is now stored really sure. The reaction of EA / Maxis was unsatisfactory to awkward part. For this unacceptable service I subtract a star from my rating. Nevertheless, the game is now running relatively stable and earned his now largely functioning form your own review.

Positive
The biggest selling point of the new Sim City is undoubtedly the simulation of the city and its inhabitants. The partly existing (and partly feigned) complexity is very high and is very well illustrated by meaningful images and maps. After a few games you will understand the relationships and can increasingly efficiently plan and implement its cities. This learning process and the Herumbauen to his city makes a lot of fun and motivation to keep going. Add to this the very detailed and lovely graphics, which can be infinitely varied up to detailed zoom and rotate. This affects my opinion clearly detailed, realistic and above all wuseliger as eg. In Anno 2070. Very good the sound effects and the music are managed. The latter adapts dynamically to the current view on what looks very fit. As far as the game is very good and had the potential to be "game addiction" in the coming months and the deserted island after. Unfortunately, there are two main problems that stand in the way.

Problem card size
As mentioned in many other reviews, the maximum card size is significantly smaller than in SC4. This means that you have arrived, and the cities rather quickly on the potential growth limit. Already at the initial stage of the game you will feel cramped and strange with a little practice you quickly reach the arbitrary translucent limit that one restarts play. At last I was able to build a city with almost continuous maximum density and approximately 350,000 inhabitants in around 3-4 hours. While one would now start and join the next borough in Sim City 4, in Sim City is 5 final and there is hardly anything you can do around the city to improve even further. The result then looks back from the index rather ridiculous, namely as a square, cramped block of high-rise buildings. The Maxis argument that the small city size would lead to more careful planning, I do not accept - this could have been implemented better by example the players offering new land areas in succession to purchase..

Multiplayer problem
The idea to build a kind of multiplayer mode in which multiple players together colonize a region sounds good initially. In practice, it has for me, unfortunately works rather moderate, which in my case were two reasons:
On the one hand it is difficult to join a multiplayer Region. If you select 'Join' in the game, the result is a long list of regions, which can not filter and indicating in particular regions, which are already full. So you have to laboriously search for a region that has not yet been fully and hope that this is still free when you join. This would probably be better able to solve, if need be with an 'auto-join' function.
The second problem is that you can - at least in the public games - has no bearing on who joins the game. In a game where I've started their own little area with three cities, two other players have settled after a short time, both of which have an estimated 15 minutes relocated a couple of streets and areas to be bored to leave their cities forever. What remains are the ruins in my neighborhood. While there is probably an opportunity to take this after a certain time, but let's face it, who wants to clean up the city scrap his former neighbors? To solve this problem would be an evaluation system (there is not), on the reports / punishing players who behave next with intent (does not) or limiting the number of cities that a player can have (currently too high).

In short, the multiplayer aspect does, if at all, only with friends sense. And without the multiplayer aspect makes the whole game makes little sense. It's a shame, because the core aspect of Städtebauens is extremely well done. Presentation and depth of simulation are probably unprecedented. Unfortunately, the long-term motivation is literally severely limited by Multiplayer coercion and cities constriction. After less than 10 hours, I have to have already made to feel everything and feel, unlike its predecessors, little desire to return to the game. At least with the city size Maxis has promised to make amends - but if this episode has a demonstrated then that should not be trusted too early to statements from Maxis / EA.