SimCity Updated Review

Finally. After months of demands, the long-awaited Update 10 for SimCity has made the city-building simulation available for offline play. Still, it's a case of too little, too late. Removing one of the primary irritants that made the game so aggravating at launch has done surprisingly little to make it likable, since all of the same old miscues like multiplayer-centric regional city building and dumbed-down zoning continue to make your mayoral duties fussy and unrealistic.
Gameplay has been carried forward almost untouched in Update 10. This is a straightforward patch that removes the need to connect to the Maxis servers before being able to play. Just turn on offline mode in the Origin launcher before firing up the game, and you're good to go without the Net. That pesky DRM disguised as a game feature is now gone, and good riddance. A year ago, the disastrous launch saw thousands of people unable to play the game for lengthy stretches of time due to network issues. Even when you could get online, the game was often sluggish and prone to random disconnections and lost save files. But most of these problems were cleared up ages ago, even though minor outages were common right into last fall. So as much as removing the Internet requirement is a blessing, it ceased to be a deal breaker some time back.

SimCity really enters the future with Update 10's removal of the always-on Internet irritation, but the game design remains flawed in key areas.

Still, there is a real positive to finally being able to play completely solo. Saves are stored locally. Maps can be saved multiple times now. This is a small change, but a really valuable one for those times that you want a do-over if a subdivision isn't working out like you planned or you want to rethink the 120K of simoleons you just blew on a new mall level in a MegaTower (the Cities of Tomorrow expansion is fully supported here, along with all of the previously released downloadable content). Of course, the offline trade-off is losing all of the online features. You can easily switch back and forth between the online and offline modes depending on whether you want to play with others or play by yourself, but the two have been completely separated to keep people from cheating in multiplayer and on ranking boards. All this really means is that you can't move regions.