Expansion reviews can sometimes be a bit predictable. In 90-percent of cases, you can predict that you'll like or hate the expansion based on whether you like or hate the core game. But SimCity Societies: Destinations is a bit different. While it doesn't address the arbitrary nature (and seeming irrelevance) of the social energies that forms the core gameplay, it finally adds some focus and direction to the game with an entirely new traveler wow gold mechanic. Now instead of simply plopping buildings down according to their energy impact, you'll need to consider how each new building can attract and serve the new coffer-boosting vacationers.

We were very critical of the lack of direction in the original SimCity Societies, but the actual gameplay really does pick up with the addition of tourism. Creating a city that attracts loads of visitors is much more challenging than the social energy balancing that served as the gameplay in the core game. You're trying to attract travelers for one main reason: they bring lots of disposable income that can boost your treasury. The trick here is that the travelers place a substantial burden on your city services and compete with your actual residents for the happiness-boosting venues.

Knowing just what each traveler wants is key to building a successful destination town. To that end, you can examine their Sim card to see how they feel about your city's services. The main city info screen for travelers also indicates whether or wow gold not your city has a positive or negative reputation among travelers of a given type. This can let you tell at a glance whether or not you need to cater more or less to a particular group. Of course, since pretty much everyone seems to want leisure and entertainment, you can't go wrong.

Along with the new tourist-focused gameplay, the Destinations package also includes a few new additions. The first, the Strategic Mode has already been made available as a patch to the core game. It basically adds a maintenance cost to each building, wow powerleveling which can make balancing the budget a trickier proposition. As far as challenges go, it's still not going to make you sweat, but at least it makes you put some thought into your building placement, and try to maximize the profitability and happiness of the buildings in your city.

There are also some new scenarios here that provide the same sort of "get X amount of Y resource" goals that we see in most other city builders. The difference here is that there are some particularly interesting losing conditions that make you think a little bit harder about your objectives. You'll have to try, for instance, to get a good spiritual city going without ever going over 800 population, or to build a massive gambling retreat wow powerleveling in less than 30 days. While the objectives aren't terribly challenging, the restrictions are what make the scenarios worth investigating

Destinations doesn't look or sound much different than the core game but the developers have stated that they've improved the engine's performance overall. While we're not sure we can remember exactly how well the game was running when we reviewed it eight months ago, the expansion still suffers from framerate issues, particularly in larger cities. We've also had a number of lockups, both in our brand new cities and in our old saved cities.