Excellent mobile city-builder! – Pocket City Review

This app is like Cities Skylines for your phone. It’s what SimCity BuildIt SHOULD have been. The biggest draw for me was the lack of in-app purchases and a true sandbox mode. The formula for the game is a bit on the simplistic side compared to something like SimCity 3000 or 4. But, because it’s a mobile game, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The touch controls work great, the game does have some charm with it’s writing, RCI makes sense, taxes can be adjusted to milk citizens dry, etc. There are only a few issues I can think of as of writing. The game does get pretty choppy when your city gets pretty large. I’m playing on a iPad mini 4 and a iPhone 7 and the frame rate does dive a lot on my current city (population ~13,000, level 89). This app also does drain the battery. There are a few options to ease the burden on the hardware, but there is still a significant hit to battery when playing. Keep a charger close or leave it plugged in while playing and you’ll be fine. After an hour of playing on my iPhone, I had lost about 40% charge with some of the settings toned down. The game can also get hard to control on smaller screens. Lastly, the game does kind of run out of things to do in the late game. I’ve purchased all available plots of land and am almost at level 100. But, my city is almost maxed out and I earn more money than I can spend. I’d also like it if there were “deals” you could make like in SimCity 3000 and policies you could change like in Skylines. With the addition of some late-game features/objectives, this could be a slam dunk game. But, that being said, for a $5 full-city builder, this is a great buy.
Review by HalfBurntToast on Pocket City.