Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis' prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface.

Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

Acknowledging that "it wasn't primarily designed as an entertainment product", he criticized the "not well developed" victory conditions, reporting that he got a high score in one game by "sacrific[ing] nearly all of the big and small business firms in the country to achieve the win!

Schlesinger found that adopting an extreme libertarian ideology including ending Medicare and many other government services resulted in almost hands-off victory although "the entire private insurance industry goes bankrupt in the first three months".

He pointed out various factual errors and extensively criticized its community vs. efficiency and liberty vs. equality axes, arguing that these values were not necessarily opposed to each other.