Pocket City 9+

In the day and age that we live in with ‘free’ apps that truly are not free, I have to say this is refreshing to buy a game that has no micro transactions or cool down timers, energy, or long wait times. This game takes me back to my childhood playing the old city builders and just enjoying the gameplay without the annoying pay or time walls.

This was an insta-buy for me, and so happy I did as it is what I have been wanting for some time. A game I could sit down and enjoy playing on my device that didn’t have all the typical micro transactions that I really wish was outlawed in the App Store.

Thank you for the pleasure that is this game to play! For the record, I would be ok with expansions or additional content based on the current business model. Again, thank you for a wonderfully made game, I will continue to watch for more from this developer.

A lot of the positive reviews of Pocket City talk about how great it is that it’s paid up front with no sneaky in-app purchases, and that is indeed a good thing. Problem is that the gameplay is still too much like those dull microtransaction games.

Everything is based on arbitrary levelling up, rather than on building a well-designed city. Your choices of where to place things hardly matter because the simulation is so basic: build a dozen fire stations next to each other or spread them across the map... it doesn’t matter, either one works to satisfy the quest for 95% fire safety that levels you up. The economic model is broken: the game constantly expects you to build more shops than houses, which doesn’t make for a very realistic city. You earn so much tax money that you hit an arbitrary bank account limit within seconds, so money is never a limiting factor... unless the item you want to buy is more than your limit, in which case you have to wait until you level up and get a bigger bank account limit. SPOILER ALERT: you can easily level up by bulldozing then rebuilding the same block over and over and over and over and over... it’s not fun, but then again I didn’t find much opportunity for fun in this game.

Great little game, very addictive and easy to play. I went through the tutorial, started a city on hard mode and finished a sandbox city and got a total of 9 hours gameplay before I started to get bored.
Hard and expert difficulty levels aren’t really harder they are just slower as you have to wait longer to generate money to build so I don’t really see the point in playing through those. It would be good if the harder levels were harder in zoning requirements - like people didn’t want to live close to industrial areas and so it was harder to satisfy citizens with a bad design.
The ability to place multiple things in one go without having to go through the menu and reselect it each time would be good(like laying down multiple bus stops).
But overall a very enjoyable and cute little city builder.