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It's almost like your Sims are window dressing. This sounds varied enough, but in truth, this stuff doesn't make the gameplay more engaging because you never need it. It's just a visual change, but it's fun to see a mime from your clown school wandering around. For example, if a Sim visits a meditation center, he or she may turn into a monk. Sims that visit buildings may also take on a buildings characteristics. The building interface is done fairly well here, making it easy to turn buildings at 45-degree angles plunk them down and trigger special building events, such as a karaoke bar's release party or the asylum's invitation to hooky-playing Sims to go to therapy. It makes things a little more exciting, but never all that engaging. Or cause a purposeful natural disaster, such as a killer storm, at the touch of a button. If you want, make a slum, and the crime rate will rise. If you want a challenge, you have to make one. You may not have a police station, yet your city could go completely free of crime. There's no tug of war between industry versus commerce, no real infrastructure to worry about (unless you count energy-producing structures that power the whole map an infrastructure), and no imposed social class system. You can view stats on such things as public health, crime, and pollution, but it just feels like there's no point because there's absolutely no challenge. You do need to spend wisely because buildings cost Simoleans in addition to social energies, though you will likely never struggle with your economy. Why would a service station spend productivity, while a butcher shop creates it? All you can do is look beyond it and realize that it's not a connection at all-just a random abstraction created to balance out what is in effect six different currencies running simultaneously.
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Just don't ask why it is a police station spends authority-like many of the categorizations, the connection between a building and its social energies is mighty unclear. Doing that makes everything from Sim happiness to your coffers fall nicely into place. To succeed in SimCity Societies, all you have to do is treat your social energies as currency and keep them relatively evened out. Your Sims need to have places to work, hang out, and live, but you'll rarely need to worry about it. The categorizations are actually rather helpful because you can create themed neighborhoods without having to scroll through full lists of buildings. As your city grows, you unlock newer buildings and décor, each of which is separated into various themes, such as "romantic" or "cyberpunk." You don't have to theme your city, so feel free to mix and match. There are six of these energies, from creativity to spirituality, and each building uses or provides them in different amounts. The idea sounds good in theory: Each building you place has a positive or negative effect on a particular social energy. If you wanted an intricate system of checks and balances to hold it together, or economic depth, or something that would give you any sense of challenge, you won't find it here. There are a lot of buildings and a lot of decorations, so if you just want to plunk down buildings and make a pretty city, go for it. It's a highly casual take on the city-building genre, which isn't bad in and of itself, but it comes across like a politician's campaign speech: rambling on and on, but with no real depth or point. There's something not quite right with SimCity Societies.