City Life: New 3D Planning Game Called 'SimCity With a Conscience'

CityLife is a new 3D city building simulation being marketed as an introduction to urban planning for gamers. The game challenges players to design, build and manage a modern day metropolis in a fully 3D environment. In the game, players create a living city, and strive to maintain harmony mong six different sociocultural groups "through skilled urban planning and meeting their day-to-day needs." There are over 250 possible building types and classifications, and cities can be build on any of 22 predefined maps, or you can script an entirely new map.

CDV's tagline for the game is: "CDV Kicks Urban Planning into Overdrive with the Release of City Life". From the game website:

"From superb villas in residential neighborhoods to imposing skyscrapers in the financial district, design, construct and develop the city of your dreams. Provide comfort and satisfaction for your citizens by offering them adequate leisure and entertainment facilities, all the while ensuring that taxes and other charges are collected efficiently. It's up to you to manage this city effectively, ensuring booming development while at the same time regulating the very delicate issues of pollution and traffic. You must also see that diverse communities share the city in the best way possible to guarantee a peaceful and prosperous city.

City Life is a next-generation city simulation that allows you to build and manage a living metropolis in gorgeous real-time 3D. The 3D game engine provides a level of detail and animation unprecedented in the city builder genre. Among the game’s superior features are highly realistic environments, reflection mapping, a tree engine, dynamic shadowing, and an immersion mode (giving players the first-person point of view as they advance through cities). City Life is a unique game experience and an exciting new challenge for the man fans of city builders and simulations.

...In City Life, not only must you worry about the infrastructure and development of your city, you must also take into consideration the needs and expectations of your population. As a guru of urban planning, your role is not only to manage the finances of your creation, but also to facilitate the coexistence of the six socio-economic cultural groups: the elite, the bobos, the suits, the fringe, the blue collars and the have-nots."

From GameSpy's review:

"Leading Gaming Site Compliments City Life on Depth of Social Layer

"Once the player gets into the game, however, real differences between it and other city-builders start to emerge. Rather than being based on buildings and zones and some abstract version of "citizen happiness," the social model of City Life is based on the collective mood of individualized citizens. Every inhabitant of a City Life city has a name, address, place of work, and places they like to go for fun -- and an attitude. How happy they are is based on what kind of home they live in, whether they're employed, if they have access to their preferred sorts of amenities, and what sort of neighborhoods they have to pass through and the people they meet as they make their daily rounds."

CityLife is published by CDV Software Entertainment USA, and was created by an video game company, MonteCristo which was created in 1995 in Paris, and which has offices in Kiev.