Streets of SimCity

Overview

Driving around in a city from SimCity 2000 should be a fun and rewarding experience and clearly that was the goal of Streets of SimCity. Instead, it becomes a disastrous experience, not even a flawed one.

Review

If you played the CD-ROM version of SimCity 2000, you might remember Will Wright talking about the possibility of, say, building a car and putting into another game, as well more of playing with others. That seems behind the idea of Streets of SimCity, the last title Maxis produced before its purchase by EA. In Streets of SimCity you can do that, taking a car, adding different parts to it (including a variety of weapons) and drive it around your city with up to eight players.

This all sounds like a great idea on paper, but there are a lot of things wrong with it. A LOT wrong with it, actually, the fact that a bunch of other games released around the same time did the same thing but better (with bugs and issues holding Streets of SimCity even further back) but the gimmick is that you can use your cities from SimCity 2000 with it (or even SimCity Classic if you wanted), but there's an inherent problem. SimCity 2000 cities are generally designed with right angles and sometimes dead ends to get to those hard-to-reach spots. In a driving game, these are impediments and make it not fun. (Something the critics noted back in 1997, by the way).

The other problem is that the buildings as they appear in Streets of SimCity look nothing like what they did in SimCity 2000, so if you're looking for landmarks to help you guide through the map, forget it. As it comes with the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit to build your own cities, you'd think it would SOMEWHAT resemble the graphics of SimCity 2000 but it doesn't.

To test this theory I built a tiny map with some of the more iconic buildings. How do they actually appear in-game? See if you can tell...

While it can be patched to run on modern machines (basically, copy the CD's content to a folder, run the patch, select the CD's EXE) it still doesn't fix the issues of the game itself. It's buggy, exceptionally ugly even for a 1997 game, not fun to play, and you can even keep driving off the map and it won't tell you when to stop.

Player Notes

I played this in late April 2026.