If you're a fan of Maxis' Sim series, you'll probably enjoy the latest installment. SimTower starts you off with a bunch of money and an empty space. By combining these two components in various ways, you can ultimately construct a building up to 100 floors high and 10 basements deep, populated with condos, offices, restaurants, movie theaters and hotel rooms.
This sounds like a fun premise, and it is, but the game itself is marred by poor choices made by the designers, mostly in the area of how the interface works. This isn't a fatal flaw, but it can keep the game from being as much fun as it might be.
To begin, you take some of your starting cash and buy lobby spaces. These are placed horizontally across the bottom of the building screen at ground level. The width of your lobby controls how wide any of the higher floors can be. Proceeding from there, you can add additional layers containing offices, condos and fast food restaurants. Eventually, you can add hotel rooms, movie theaters, security offices, and other types of venues. Each of these individual structures can be clicked on, and some basic information reviewed and changed. For example, spaces for sale or rent can be assigned a rate from a drop-down list box. Each can also be assigned a unique name for easier monitoring.
Once your floors are made accessible, via stairs or elevators, sim-people will begin to occupy these spaces. The sims can also be clicked on, which gives you a pop-up dialog allowing you to name them and showing how content they are in general, and how stressed they are at that given moment. Stress occurs when a sim has to wait too long to catch an elevator to get where he's going, and therein lies the heart of the gameplay. It's unfortunate, but watching your sims change color from black to pink to red as they get stressed out is very entertaining. (In my opinion, the game would have been even more fun if you started with a completed building and had to *mis*-manage it and drive people away.)
In order to keep your tenants happy, you must supply them with sufficient transportation. Sims who repeatedly get stressed out waiting for an elevator will lose enthusiasm for occupying your building, and won't encourage their friends to take up space there. To keep them happy, you must keep the elevators running smoothly. Each elevator shaft can have up to eight cars, each of which has a "home base" called its waiting floor. This is, obviously, the floor at which the car waits when it is not responding to a call. You can also deactivate certain floors, and set several characteristics which can change over the course of the day. For example, elevators can be set to express to the bottom or the top, or to wait a specified time for passengers to get on. You can also determine how many floors a waiting car will travel to pick up a passenger.
This sounds complicated - and it is - but for the most part, it is handled smoothly. The interface does get a bit kludgy at times, which can be very annoying. For example, there's no way to set "default" waiting times for all the elevators in your building, so if you have three elevator shafts, you have to set the value for each. That's one mouse click to increase the wait time . . . times three elevators . . . times six time periods in a day . . . times two (for weekend and weekday), for a grand total of thirty-six. And that doesn't include the mouse-clicks required to actually jump into those time periods. Clearly, this can get tedious after a while.
Another major annoyance is the way values are abbreviated on the balance sheet. Values have two zeroes chopped off, so you have to mentally multiply them by 100. This is, in a word, dumb. Does anybody really have the ability to look at "two hundred hundred" and know without thinking that it's the same as twenty thousand? Dividing by 1,000 would have been more intuitive. Who tested this game, and why did they never tell the designers about this concept?
Despite these shortcomings, SimTower is fun to play. It's very satisfying to complete the requirements for earning another star (ratings go up to five) and have a bunch of new toys appear for you to play with. If there were more elements you could control directly, it would be even more fun. (Don't buildings require plumbing and heating/air conditioning? What about an option to build "luxury" or "cheap" versions of the various units, thus justifying higher or lower costs?) If you're the type of person whose stress level goes up (changing your color from pink to red . . . ) while playing a game where the interface hasn't been fully thought through, you should probably steer clear of SimTower. Otherwise, ignore the annoying "features" of the interface, and take a stab at building the tower of your dreams.
