Life in the city is cherished by some and loathed by others. Some people hate the pollution and busy streets that often plague cities, while others enjoy their proximity to places of employment - being close to pubs goes down quite well too! Whatever you think of life in cities, City Life 2008 Edition, the new city-management game from developers Monte Cristo, places you in the top spot to build, nurture and maintain your own city. City management is not a new genre though - so can City Life 2008 demolish the competition and stand like a skyscraper towering above them? Sadly, while it does have many advantages, I don't think it will.

One reason the game won't crush the opposition, including SimCity and CivCity: Rome, is that there is no overall story and therefore no aim of play - no goal to reach. Maybe this is a bit unfair, as SimCity has no overall story either - yet it is still fun to play. What City Life does have is hundreds of individual scenarios - often involving real-world locations and each with their own mini-stories. These mini-stories usually contain some historical facts about that area, such as "home to a thriving city before being completely wiped out by the Black Death" - a very useful feature that lends a sense of realism to the game. The historical references are only brief so as not to bore you, but they often give no clue as to the actual objectives of the scenario, leading to frustration later on while your city is growing.

Scenarios are grouped into climate zone and terrain type; for example, there is a group of mountainous scenarios and a group of tropical scenarios. Each scenario within a group consists of a single large map divided into regions where you can build your city. You click the town icon on one of these regions to buy it, allowing you to start construction. Unfortunately, there isn't much reason to choose one region over any other - it is only for aesthetic appeal. What isn't just pleasing to the eye however is your city hall, the command centre of the city, which you have to position after you have bought the region that looks prettiest. With your city hub established, you are now free to build roads, houses, bridges and power plants to your heart's content - as long as your budget allows, of course! If you successfully balance your profit and expenditure you'll have a booming economy and enough cash to buy a new region of land for your city to invest. However, getting this far is hard for a newcomer without much business sense - there is no advisor mode to explain the basics as you play and the tutorials are things to be read, not played. No playable tutorials to get you off the ground mean that to establish a successful city you will need to spend time learning city management techniques beforehand - this is not one for the casual gamer!

For those who are more used to diving straight into a game, some guidance as to how to develop your city is provided by the live broadcasting window at the bottom-right of the screen. This window occasionally reports that your city is growing, providing a sense of achievement in raising a city from its beginnings where you buy a region of land to create your city hall through to the creation of houses and electricity plants, to a bustling metropolis filling the entire map. Nurturing a city from a single building all the way to a busy metropolis may at first appear daunting - this is a detailed and realistic city management simulator - but you'll be constructing drive-in movie theatres and luxurious vistas in no time. To aid you in this task, the interface is relatively easy to use and well laid out, despite the game featuring over three hundred types of building! The interface lists the building types down the left side of the screen, all neatly categorised to make finding the one you want much easier, while your total money, income and city population are clearly displayed at the top - all essential information for a successful city. You obviously want a successful city but, as with most city building games, an unsuccessful city is not punished - falling into thousands of dollars' worth of debt is fine, according to the game - in fact, I can't think of any way to actually lose!

Another way of having an unsuccessful city is by allowing one of the six subcultures in each city you create to mix with another subculture. Every citizen in your city belongs to one of the subcultures and each subculture has its own likes and dislikes. For instance, the Blue Collars do not like the Fringe subculture but they do like going to Irish Pubs - don't we all! If you build houses for the Blue Collars and the Fringe near to each other then riots will start. When this happens, CCTV footage of the incident is shown in the broadcast window, giving you ample warning to sort it out before things escalate - but if you're really unlucky then one side may kill the other - citizens can die! To ensure that things don't get out of hand, you have no choice but to demolish one of the houses, unless your city has advanced enough to have a police station that will dispatch bobbies via helicopter to break things up. It's best to compare these subcultures to gangs in GTA: San Andreas - each one has a territory. You can see that territory by the colour of the sidewalks in the city - a bit odd, but it works surprisingly well. You build a house and the street outside it is shaded orange, indicating that the Fringe own it and you immediately realise you shouldn't build a house for Blue Collars nearby. This ends up with your city separated into districts - so stay away from the bad side of town where the gangster home-boy Have Nots live!

Staying out of the bad side of town isn't always possible though, as the city relies on its inhabitants working together - and this is where it becomes tricky. Certain buildings require a mixture of workers - you will have to position them carefully, so they are far enough away from each territory to avoid brawls while being close enough for the workers to reach. Choosing the right building position and managing rival gang territories adds an almost puzzle-like element to the game - a truly excellent concept and something that other games in the genre are missing. Take note developers - city management isn't all about numbers!

What developers do usually get right is the camera control and City Life 2008 Edition is no exception - moving and rotating the camera can get a bit fiddly at times and takes some getting used to, but this is expected because of the large buildings that can hide things in their shadow. One really neat feature is zooming in and out with the mouse wheel. Zooming out gives you a wonderfully distant view of your city - especially useful as it becomes super sized - and if you keep zooming out you arrive at a top-down view of the entire map, where you can buy whole new regions to expand your city into. Zooming in is equally awesome - you can even zoom in so far that your view rotates into first person, allowing you to walk along the streets as a citizen of your town! As enjoyable as walking around the city you have constructed is, it is really nothing more than a gimmick - you get another angle on things but there's nothing that affects the gameplay. Another problem with zooming in so far is that it just shows off the awful clipping problems that the game has - hospital workers climb out of ambulances with stretchers sticking through their waists and cars on large motorways appear from nowhere, only to vanish again at the end. In addition to this you are free to pass through solid walls and into the empty houses - not a pleasant experience!

Equally displeasing is the sound - a bit lacking I think. To increase the busy, living city feel there should be more police car sirens wailing and honks from cars stuck in traffic. These sounds would, in reality, not be heard at the level you normally view the city - but I really that effects like these would benefit the game's atmosphere. On top of this, the music isn't that great either. Like SimCity, City Life has a jazz soundtrack - with trumpets and saxophones - which is well done but doesn't really suit the gameplay. It's great on menus and non-gameplay bits, but during play it just loops over-and-over with similar tunes - even changing level doesn't change the music - which can become annoying.

The graphics are superb however - not as good as you might expect from the screenshots, but still very good. The screenshots give the indication of a day/night cycle and there is a sort of cycle in the game, but disappointingly and bizarrely it is left to you to click a dawn, day, night or dusk button to change the sky! Also there are no weather effects - it is always clear sky and sunny. However, buildings, cars, streets, environments and citizens are suitably detailed, birds occasionally fly over your city and water is reflective and realistic. A plane sometimes flies over too, casting an incredibly realistic shadow, although the actual plane cannot be seen - ever! The system requirements to play the game are very low - always a plus point - although presumably some of the detail and graphical sheen is lost playing the game at these low settings.

What cannot be lost though is the massive scale and longevity of City Life 2008 Edition. The game is so long because you get the entire campaign from the original City Life as well as the new campaign (really just a clutch of independent scenarios) of the 2008 Edition. In addition to the many weeks' worth of play provided by these campaigns, there is a free build mode where you can build the city of your dreams with no time constraints or objectives to accomplish. Once you get bored of creating the same city buildings, you can create your own using the building customise tool or try your hand at creating maps. These editors are far from simple to use, but they do come with adequate documentation to aid you. These extras to give the game more life are all well and good, but I believe you'll be bored with the game long before you reach the end.

City Life 2008 Edition is a decent, if not wonderful, city management game - there are some elements that really shine and the most impressive is the management of subcultures within the one city - adding a wonderful real city feel and a welcome innovative twist to the genre. Not as outstanding - but still high quality - are the graphics and level of detail. However, there are some glaring mistakes - most notably the lack of overall story and unforgivable clipping problems that would have been hidden by not including the gimmicky first person viewpoint feature. You just don't get the feeling that the cities you create are real when citizens and cars magically appear and disappear - and without this sense of reality that competitor games like SimCity can provide, City Life 2008 Edition leaves you wanting more.

Reviewed by Tom Clark for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).