We often wound up selecting the wrong type of tool, drawing a line when we wanted a square, and then having to go back into the menus several times to select a bulldozer, flatten the mistake, reselect the correct shape and carry on. There’s no undo function either. Disregarding those problems, which may well be related to our own clumsiness and impatience, SimCity Creator is more than just a brilliant sandbox to mess around in. If you want a more structured challenge, there’s a mission mode that gives you a partially built city and sets various goals, from reducing traffic congestion to attracting tourists or promoting greener industry.

Some of the challenges introduce gameplay elements that you might otherwise miss, so they’re more useful than ordinary tutorials. In a twisted vision of London 2012, one mission required us to build sports facilities to nurture a professional athlete, which we did at the expense of the city’s entire police, fire, education and public health budget. Because managing all areas of a large city can become a pain, it’s possible to employ assistants to do the donkey work for you. If you stick them in neglected areas they’ll build zones according to the residents’ needs. To test it out, we put six assistants in an empty field, drew a few roads to get them started, and within half an hour we had a city of more than 20,000.

More advanced players can enter contests, which are like advanced versions of the mission mode with online scoreboards for comparing your progress with other players. But if you haven’t got an internet connection for your Wii, you can’t play this mode at all. With a collection of galleries for viewing the landmarks you’ve unlocked, some flight-based minigames and the option to have multiple cities on the go, there’s more to SimCity Creator than most players are likely to see. The 30 built-in missions will be exhausted eventually, as will the challenge mode – for those with access to it – but the main sandbox mode is completely open-ended. Building something impressive is difficult, but if frustration sets in you can deliberately set the place alight and then play the hero by managing the emergency services. Everyone’s a winner.

Sep 29, 2008