Sim City BuildIt Review

By AJ Hanson on 29/04/2024 21:51 UTC

As a child, I loved the SimCity series. My first Gateway computer in 1998 came with SimCity included in its software bundle. I have many fond memories of slaving over my computer screen night upon night after school, building up my cities and then destroying them when it came time for my 8 year old brain to make decisions I couldn\'t fully process yet. It was incredible. It was one of the first PC series I can remember being truly “hooked” on. The joy of wielding the powers of a god at my city when its residents got frustrated or moved to another city never waned. Hurling tornadoes and throwing assorted things from the sky were not unheard of in my SimCity playthroughs.

Its hard to believe its been 17 years since I first played through a SimCity game. In those years, the SimCity series faded into distant memory and then was re-launched by EA with “SimCity” in 2013, which was met with its own set of controversy and issues at launch. SimCity BuildIt is a mobile based game available for iOS and Android platforms and aims to capture the essense of SimCity while keeping up with EA\'s ever growing mobile freemium model.

If you\'re going into BuildIt expecting a full mobile version of the SimCity game you grew up with, I\'m sad to say you will be very disappointed. BuildIt isn\'t really a simulator game, it is more of a puzzle game that has you spending gobs of time waiting to unlock the next piece of the puzzle to put together and plan your neighborhood. It starts off simple enough, but gets increasingly more frustrating the more you have to wait for hours (and sometimes days) for your object, building, or upgrade to be complete. This isn\'t a traditional SimCity game and as such there is very little actual city management to do. Players must instead use their factories and refineries and other production buildings to farm resources to build up residential areas. Residential areas are the key to SimCity BuildIt, as each one gives you a coin or set of coins to construct more buildings, purchase utilities and upgrades, or produce city services.

Its here where the “freemium” game model hits you like a train running into a brick wall. Like most other “check back in X minutes” games, BuildIt forces you to wait various chunks of times (ranging from 5 seconds to 5 days) for different resources. You can pay into their coin system to upgrade your city faster, but the prices are outrageous. No one in their right mind would spend $5 USD on a pack of coins not large enough to build more than a few residential buildings. Service buildings for example, cost a lot of coinage to produce and you\'ll have to shell out a metric ton of money in order to produce the number of buildings you need right away. While there are cheaper alternatives to some buildings, they offer a smaller service radius which can harm other areas of your city long term. Its an incredibly time consuming business. It doesn\'t feel like a game at certain points, it feels like work.

SimCity sure tries to make you feel amazing when you do get to upgrade your buildings however. Every time you upgrade your building, build a new structure, or do something that the game “likes” you\'re rewarded with massive fanfare music and fireworks...and two or three coins for your trouble.

It was hard for me to keep playing the game. As I stated above, it felt like work, like a chore, like something I just had to do for the purpose of writing this review. I really enjoyed the thought of SimCity in my pocket. What I got was a neighborhood planning game that might as well have been called “NeighborhoodVille”. The only real joy I got from the game was looking at how my city evolved and changed over time. My city grew leaps and bounds at my command. Sadly however, the feedback that is so essential to the SimCity series has been watered down to mere percentage points and numbers on a list, making it almost impossible to remember what percent I was at the last time I played the game.

6

“SimCity Build It tries to make up for the hell that was SimCity on PC\'s...and falls flat on its face.”

The game is incredibly well designed graphically, however. Playing on both an Android tablet and my iPhone 6 Plus, I couldn\'t help but smile and gush at the detail that went into the way the game looks. Its just a shame that more attention wasn\'t paid to the rest of the game overall. I understand that this, at the end of the day, is a freemium game set out to cash in on the popularity of other titles like it by slapping the SimCity brand onto it, but I just can\'t get behind it as a long time series fan.
Story0%
Gameplay70%
Graphics90%