Gamer reviews for SimCity BuildIt

Simcity BuildIt

A few years back, I was pretty excited to hear that two of my favorite game series are having new entries after years of absolutely nothing. The game franchises are Hitman and SimCity (I did not count SimCity Societies because it is of a different genre). When Hitman: Absolution arrived, I was largely disappointed with how the game played. When SimCity 2013 came, I was insulted, it was the worst $60 purchase I had.

Hitman Go, though, is fantastic. I am a bit suspicious of SimCity's mobile entry. It is coming from EA, voted as the worst company by an online poll, which I disagree, let's leave it at that because we don't want a segue.

SimCity BuildIt is free to download but with In-App Purchases. The microtransaction part is a red flag initially. How will EA implement a monetization scheme for a simulation game, especially in a city building genre?

If you think this is SimCity 2000, come to think of it, the mobile hardware today is more than capable of running even an updated version of SimCity 2000, well, this is not the game for you. SimCity BuildIt is an offshoot of the genre. Think of Tiny Tower in a larger scale, yes, that would be it. You build buildings and infrastructures and wait for them to be completed in a few hours or instantly (for a fee, affordable but if you can wait, just wait).

Factories create the building block. Building blocks create residences. Residences create population. Population creates money. Money creates factories, infrastractures, and stores. Residences also creates experience. The population, after hitting a certain threshold, will unlock buildings. The same happens with experience points. Buildings are also unlocked by completing certain tasks, like completing shipping orders.

SimCity BuildIt can be played with little regard to strategy. However, it is still best that you should apply a little bit of it since the game is all about effeciency and proper zoning. Services such as fire department and police are needed to be placed in areas where they can cover much of the city. Parks should be assigned in places that you need to develop too.

Coins are necessary in this game since city expansion relies heavily on these resources. Even the basic services like water, electricity, and sewage consume coins like nobody's business. You will hit a wall, progress is slow, and it is up to you if you want to buy some coins in order to push forward your city. Thankfully, there are other ways to gain coins like selling your surplus to players and other cities.

The graphics of this game are top-notch. This is one of the best-looking game in the mobile space, and most impressively, for its scale, the graphics did not suffer at all. You can tilt and inspect your city at the different angles. You can zoom and see the details. The details are better when you look at them closer, which is not the case for most mobile games with comparable scale.

The SimCity series is famous for its wonderful music, and here, you will have it. The tracks may be limited as compared to its PC games brethren, but they are still better than 100% of other games in the market.

SimCity BuildIt may not be the SimCity you wanted from the 2013 release, because it will be like that, and good thing it is not like that. This game is a sane mobile version of one of the best games ever conceived. Yes, it is inferior to its older brothers, but it stands out in the mobile arena as the one and only city simulator that is worth your time out there.