Meteorites, tornados, earthquakes and UFOs: welcome back to SimCity.

In the latest trailer for Maxis’ SimCity reboot, we get a look at one of our favourite SimCity features: disasters. The short trailer shows the chaos caused by the four randomly occuring in-game disasters, and how mayors can try to limit their impacts.

The two minutes of new footage give us a first lengthy look at how disasters play out in the new SimCity game. It is likely that further disasters will be added as downloadable content or as part of expansions, especially as several SimCity 4 disasters (lightning, robot attacks and volcanoes) appear to be missing from SimCity 2013, at least at this stage of development.

Before pre-ordering via the game’s official website on the basis of this video alone, potential mayors might want to remember that a constant internet connection is required to play the game, and you won’t be able to save games on your own PC. That means you won’t be able to return a city to its previous state after seeing meteorites rain down upon it.

It’s also worth noting that trailer doesn’t tell us if we can set these disasters off manually. We’ve heard whispers of there being a ‘cheat mode’ or at least a cheat box of some description, so we hope there will be some way for us to destroy our cities spectacularly and at will as in previous SimCity games.

The last video the Maxis team released was a ten minute gameplay video where a casino city is built from scratch. We’ve also seen a trailer for SimCity World, a kind of social hub for mayors. It’s also worth taking a look at the announcement trailer if you missed it back in March.

SimCity will release in February 2013 on PC and Mac.

Which of these disasters do you think looks the most infuriating to deal with? What are you looking forward to most in SimCity?