more beta

In terms of gameplay it worked okay.  Thing were pretty much there from previous incarnations, although there seemed to be less need for micro management, and what micromanagement you had to do was made a lot easier by the data layers, which were generally clear and obvious what they were trying to show you.

I did have some frustrations with the controls, though.

In particular, they seem to have flipped the standard movement controls backwards.  So when you want to scroll up the screen you hold the button and drag your mouse down.  You can also do edge scrolling, but it's horribly slow.

Also, the bulldozer only allows you to destroy individual buildings.  You can destroy roads in sections, but even here it tries too hard to be interpretive and will suddenly flip around to destroy an entire section of road were you just wanted to destroy a bit.  And I couldn't work out how to cancel the destruction - once you start you have to at least destroy the bit you've started on: clicking the right mouse button doesn't "cancel" it, which was annoying; particularly since it can then behave a bit weirdly when you try to fill in that bit of road.

With the roads they've introduced several ways for you to lay them down and, in particular, tried to let you do curved roads, which is something people always complained about before.  I didn't find this to be particularly good - you sort of drag the road around and it goes where it wants to go, rather than where you've directed it.  Imagine painting with a paintbrush in MS paint and the line goes all over the place, only vaguely following your pointer.  I'm sure this is so it maintains sensible crossing junctions and follows the height contour, but it was quite frustrating to actually use.

It also seemed to produce parcels of land than then weren't settled after being zoned.  I don't know if this was because they were too small or because there wasn't demand for the housing.

There was also some weirdness with it letting you place roads - oftentimes it would complain about a junction you were trying to create being "too close to another junction" but you were actually trying to make a cross-roads out of a T-junction, if you see what I mean.  This was particularly odd because if you then tried to create the same road from a different direction it would work fine.

And of course the mechanics that allow you to do curvy roads also do away with the rigid grid structure.  This is okay, but it also makes it difficult to know how things work in terms of sizes of buildings.  I kept seeing bits when I was applying zoning where it wasn't going quite up to a junction, but I had no idea if they actual buildings would compensate for this or if I should try to move the road.  Also I didn't have any feel for how big I should create each parcel of land.  It had what looked like guidelines for a grid, but these seemed somewhat flexible.

The impression I got was that you had to be quite clear where you wanted roads and zones to be.  Now, it's not like you are fixed once you've placed something - you can destroy and rebuild, obviously - but some of the municipal building in particular are very expensive, so if you have to demolish them then it could easily cost you a fortune.

My particular concern was that if I create a big square and fell it with industry am I then wasting space?  Or are there different varieties and types of building that would suit the space available?  In previous SimCity's with a grid it was clear (and, indeed, part of the rules) that if a zone was more than, say, 5 squares from a road then it wouldn't get filled.  Here you didn't assign any depth to the zone, you just applied it to the edge, and it wasn't clear to me how it worked.

And I was a bit puzzled over the mechanics of civic buildings here too.  In previous games something like the police would have a zone of effect, but here the police seem to cover the whole region and instead you "build up" the police building, adding more slots for cars and things like that.  However, that obviously means you need to leave room around them, or you're going to be bulldozing and rezone all the time.

The other thing I think they've gotten wrong is upgrading the roads.  I've no issue with that as a fundamental idea, it's just that you only seemed to be able to upgrade small strips of road at a time, so if you want to do a whole long road, you've got to do each little bit of it.  It would have been better if you could just "draw over the top" with the new road.  That would also allow you more flexibility in that you could upgrade , say, half of a long stretch of unused road (e.g. one going out to your rubbish plant) so you can add zoning just to that half.

I'm coming across as quite negative, I know.  I did enjoy the three goes I had, and felt that each time I learned something new about the mechanics and how to set up cities to achieve particular effects.  However, I was struck that each time I was effectively restarting I was kinda happy to have another go and not make the same mistakes.  Afterwards I found that a little worrying as it implied you either need to come up with quite a clear plan when you start or you're going to be doing all sorts of restructuring that may make you want to start all over again.