Bemaze

I thought this was a good expansion that added some real depth to the simulation of the city and delivered some of that original SimCity trial-and-error experience. On the surface you would be forgiven for thinking the additions were just cosmetic, but in fact they add new dimensions to building up your city and are somewhat interdependent. Transitioning my vanilla city to megatowers was not as easy as I thought it would be and there were some precarious moments where my economy went into a freefall deathspiral requiring quick intervention. You have to carefully plan your towers because once you have built a level you cannot change it unless you demolish all the levels above it, and you are limited to 8 megatowers with 8 levels each on a given map. There are lots of choices as to what you can put in a megatower which gets you thinking in a new dimension other than planning zones. At the same time you can convert your industry to OmegaCo, however this requires expensive Oil, Ore and Processors to keep running, and unless you have a strong industry a venture into this project can quickly sink your city but the potential profits make you want to try nonetheless. The Academy gives you a good reason to have wealthy residents (which you could almost make do without before), as you need them to keep your ControlNet running and you can unlock lots of research projects that improve the things you can do with Omega and Megatowers. The downside to all this is that before you really had to think about what the 'character' of your city was going to be. Was it going to be an industry-heavy city, or a research city or just a suburb for the wealthy, whereas now your city wants to be all those things. Sure you can have your cake and you can eat it, but the problem is that once you have built your first super-city of the future you are unlikely going to want to do it all over again just to get the same outcome. Overall this does what an expansion pack should do, it will bring you back to the game for a while and breathe some new life into it. Unfortunately the patient is still frail, and I doubt I will still be playing this in two weeks.

I was hoping for some kind of advancement in the series, but really this was just another installment of what we're all used to. I can't say I enjoy it any more than my old Call of Duty games back from 4-5 years ago, less so because my expectations have evolved even though this franchise has not. I'd give it a miss this year, and hope they try harder next year.