City Life 2008 Edition will not win any awards for outstanding sound. As a matter of fact, when I initially got to this section of the review I had to quit writing and get back in the game; I actually forgot what the sound sounded like. To me that just says one thing: unimpressive.

But games of this genre can not really make a name for themselves with great sound. Since there really isn’t an official storyline, there is no actor voice acting found anywhere in the game. There is the background music, but after playing the game for a few hours, all that music starts to sound like gibberish. Once again, because of the type of game that City Life is, there are no gun-battles, explosions, or invasions, so the sound is way more limited. The game does have the necessary city sounds. There is the kind of noise (background chatter) that one can hear walking around big cities. The sound of traffic is also present and it is done quite well.

While nowhere as sophisticated as Sim City Societies’ graphics, City Life 2008 Edition is by no means a bad looking game.

The zoom level in City Life is extreme. You can be so zoomed out that you city looks like a tourist attraction seen from a helicopter ride, or if you zoom all the way in, the point of view switches to a first person view. This view is awesome for walking the streets and seeing the city from the perspective of a sim.

The buildings in City Life 2008 Edition range from ghetto apartments to smoggy factories to skyscrapers to parks and airports. This game has got variety. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the graphics are not as sharp as Sim City Societies’, but in City Life you can do something that you can’t do in Societies: road building at different angles. So now with the ability to place streets wherever the towns actually look unique; even if I wanted to duplicate a town it would be for the most part impossible. To help stimulate our eyes, Paradox Interactive gave us four different light settings: day, night, dusk, and dawn. Maybe I haven’t found the right button, the one that allows for a visual transition, but as of now, the only way to see the different lighting modes is to manually switch to them.