I believe I’ve played every version of SimCity, from the very first up through current. I don’t believe I’ve ever had beyond the baseline game, except for SCURK with SimCity 2000–a worthwhile expansion, as it gave you some pretty cool creative control over things in your world.

I have been playing the newest incarnation on-and-off. It still captures the magic of SC2000 (IMO, the best of the series), but it does feel kind of limited.

Don’t get me wrong, the game has the fundamentals down–you still have to watch your Ps and Qs when it comes to population density and utilization of city services. There’s also an interplay between cities in your region that wasn’t there before.

But, the map is so much smaller with this one–even the largest that you can select feels very confining. I have yet to build a second city up yet to the point where that intercity interaction is possible yet, though, so that may make or break the game–for me, at least.

So far, though, it plays just as you’d expect a SimCity game to play–which, in and of itself, is awesome. It makes me glad I didn’t jump into the game early on in its release cycle when it was nothing but multiplayer; I think they made some much-needed correction in the interim which yielded a really nice game in its maturity.

I came from the iPhone X, but I generally alternate between iOS and Android devices with every upgrade.

I am absolutely loving vanilla Android 10 in the Pixel 4. My last Android device was a OnePlus 6. And, while Oxygen OS is lighter on the mods than the likes of Samsung, I still couldn’t get past that it wasn’t vanilla. That’s when I switched back to the iPhone X.

I really love the customization of how the lock screen behaves. I turned off “Always On” pretty quickly–I don’t need to know every second that a notification is sitting and waiting on my device, and it was good that I could ditch that at-will.

Camera is as good as I’ve seen in many reviews. This is, actually, my first Pixel device (having had Nexus devices before), and it’s refreshing to see the vanilla devices with what I perceive to leading cameras from my initial usage over the day that I’ve had it.

Maybe it’s that the iPhone X was particularly smooth, but 90Hz doesn’t really wow me. I mean, interactions are QUITE smooth with the Pixel 4 and I certainly appreciate that, but it wasn’t a complete “wow” to me.

Overall, so far, battery has held up really well. I attribute some of this to the P-OLED display–that particular kind of panel was built with diminished power consumption in mind. Also, I tend to turn off all notifications (social media, etc) except for those directly related to communication–I think I tend to be miserly with my power consumption, so maybe I’m a “best case”.

It’s only been a day, but it seems to be the best Android device and experience I’ve had to date.