Create a residential paradise or an industrial center in this fun and exciting simulation game! Construct gorgeous houses and industrial buildings as you produce goods and deliver them to the shopping malls. Make the city a cleaner place by recycling garbage, adding hospitals and fire stations, and upgrading building. Deal with economic downturn and natural disasters. Build the city of your dreams today!

Virtual city is a great game. I have been addicted since I bought it, and play for hours every day. It shows cause and effect nicely (who wants to live in a city over run with garbage) which makes the population unhappy. Get dumpsters in, clean out the garbage and bring the people back. Cut down to many trees and your environment level goes down, build more fountains, add more trees and the level goes back up! It has several production lines, build cars, furniture, pies, and electronics, and you have many different resources to use to build them. Fun game, makes you think.

I'm playing it through a second time because I enjoyed it so much. Its a high quality fun game. I'm surprised it isn't more popular. It reminds me a little of an old favorite of mine, Industry Giant 2. Its more of a transportation type game than a city building game.

4H came to my 3rd grade daughter's class and gave a presentation about a variety of things, including city planning and economic development. I wanted a fun and simple game that got progressively more complex to allow her to explore these topics. This game provided that in a way which a game like the SimCity series cannot.

There are several things about this game which are ideal for playing with your elementary schooler:

1) Each level takes between 5-10 minutes (for the early levels) to 10-30 minutes (for the advanced levels) to play
2) The pacing of the game play is ideal for chatting about what is happening while you are playing.
3) The industrial chain concepts are themselves quite thought provoking.
4) The game emphasizes fun over difficulty. Unlike real life, the city ultimately ALWAYS revives unless you are totally neglectful, and you end up with a good cash flow and with a moderate amount of energy you can have all the industries in harmony with the residents, all the residents happy and using mass transportation, the environment really good, and the trash service really efficient.

That bit of unreality aside, its got a really smooth game-play and for the price is an incredible deal.

Game as installed does not play well. The small video segments are very jerky and eventualy you must find a way to move past. Tried to go through tutorial and had same issue. I am assuming there is a conflict between my video card and one of the default configurations in the game. There is no ability to change video settings from the menu area and cant find any help online. Waste of $7.

As I've grown older, the games have gotten more complex. I love to play games (esp. "sim city" type games), but I work a lot and just don't have the time to dedicate to learning everything about a new game. I want a game that is more complex than those silly little puzzle games, but still something I can jump into for an hour or two and feel like I accomplished something and had a good time.

This game certainly fits that bill!

I've already found myself playing it for 4-5 hours and I'm not even half way through the game yet. In that regard alone, the value of the game has already been paid (seven bucks for five hours of entertainment -- I'll take it!).

I run dual monitors at 2560x1600 -- a lot of these cheaper games don't run well at that resolution. This game handles it just fine, (although I wish it would show up in wide-screen mode instead of standard-width), and even building a big complex city in sandbox mode, there's no noticeable lag.

I wish the game had the ability to rotate the screen. Sometimes you end up with a small house stuck behind a large building and it's impossible to click on. Also, selecting a house for garbage pickup when it's on the top right-hand side of the screen can be a pain.

Other than those two small downsides, this is a game that has already paid for itself, and since it runs great on Windows 7, I know I'll get years of enjoyment out of it when I want to play a city builder for an hour or two.