I’ve played pretty much all of Maxis’ games back in the day but one game I missed out on was SimTower and I never forgot that. I guess it was because I was busy with the school when it came out and it was actually made by a Japanese developer and not a Will Wright design. So when I saw this pop up on Steam I was immediately intrigued. Since I never played SimTower I had to look up information on it but I believe that while the games are visually and thematically similar, they are rather different in substance.

The game is all about building a massive skyscraper crammed full of offices, restaurants, shops and apartments. Building anything costs cash and you get income by renting space out. A lot of infrastructure is required to support the building of course, including offices for your builders, water and electricity connections, elevators and stairs and much else besides. This is the kind of game in which you plonk things down and watch your builders scurrying around to work on it and you can watch office workers and customers walk all over the building as they go about their business. Upgraded, you can add more than a hundred storeys to your skyscraper, which is way more than I have patience for.

It has to be said that there is a mind-boggling variety of stuff that you can build and they are gated by lots of prerequisites. The most basic small offices and studio apartments pay little rent but ask for nothing but basic power and water and don’t care about noise and smells. Go up the value chain and they ask for more, cable television and gas, all kinds of special services like a laundromat or in-house plumbers and complain about noise and smells. The largest offices won’t even move in unless your building hosts a sufficient variety of shopping and dining spots. A lot of the challenge of the game is building all of this up while keeping everyone happy and earning money.

Unfortunately while playing this can be a pleasant experience and there is an addictive quality to piling on more levels on top of your building, I find that I just couldn’t like this much at all. At normal difficulty earning money is just hard enough that you have to be diligent about optimizing the layout and to keep just ahead of the infrastructure and services demands so that you don’t need to pay too much maintenance costs. It also involves a lot of waiting around to save up enough money to do anything of note. Most importantly, I found that to optimize the layout I had to build in way that I found to be very aesthetically displeasing and unrealistic. Massive lobbies at the entrance for example look imposing but don’t bring in the cash. I found that I only really started to enjoy myself when I dialed the difficulty down to easy. It made me feel like I have a freer hand at designing a building that is more pleasing to me and feels more realistic. However it does make the game extremely easy and it doesn’t take much time at all to race up the value chain to build top tier offices, apartments and buildings.

At the heart of it is that it just isn’t a realistic simulation and the mechanics encourages you to build in a way that would never happen in real life. It’s silly about the residents expect the building to be what is in effect an integrated city containing all of the restaurants, shopping areas, and increasingly exotic services like dog-walking that they want, as if the city outside doesn’t matter at all. While you can move out tenants, clearing out your ground level small offices that you put in the early game so that you can build properly grand lobbies and luxury shops on the ground floor in the late game, the mechanics don’t care if you do so. The game is just as happy if you put department stores at the top of your building so after a while you feel a little silly for making the effort. No real-life building would consist of repeating layers of offices, residences and restaurants insulated by cheap studios and offices to cut off sound and smells but this is exactly what you naturally tend towards building in this game. Doing this until you reach 100+ levels would be easy, but what would be the point?

To top it all off, I find the art style in this game to be too bland and simple so it’s not even very satisfying to watch the building come to life. Funnily enough for all the complexity in the building you only need a single elevator shaft no matter how high the tower gets whereas SimTower was apparently all about managing foot traffic. I’m sure something like has its share of fans but I for one am glad to put it behind me.