Not the Sim City Experience I Wanted – SimCity BuildIt Review

I have been playing Sim City since I was a kid and I really wanted something on my iPad that would give me the experience I craved, but unfortunately this wasn’t it. I gave it three days and then I deleted the app. First off, the pros - the game looks really nice, scrolls smoothly, the graphics are high quality, and it’s responsive. I liked the little animations, especially when the street lights would come on and off. Being able to relocate buildings without cost is a nice touch. I liked being able to relocate factories away from the houses The cons - This isn’t city building, this is the player having to come back every twenty or thirty minutes to restart more resource allocation. I really don’t want to have to worry about grinding out nails or chairs or leeks just so I can build a house. Also, I understand there needing to be some randomness to the costs for upgrading a building, but it’s annoying that some buildings would require something like four nails to upgrade, and then some other building requires four plastics, five nails, and three minerals. And those are at different levels of upgrade! Furthermore, why do things like fire departments and police stations go up in price as you’re building them? I get budgetary costs going up, but being able to build the physical buildings shouldn’t cost me more for each one. It completed wiped out the little nest egg I was building to make schools for the town because I passed level 12 and had to suddenly buy police for the town, because you know, certain city functions are only available at certain levels and you don’t get to plan ahead for them, but once you pass into that level then the city function is basically essential and the whole city will fall apart with it, which means you never have a chance to save up money, which means you’re logging back in to grind factory items to sell them to other players so you can race against the clock to have enough cash to prevent everything from falling apart. I play games to enjoy myself and relax, not to have a second job that requires my attention every twenty minutes. And unfortunately the only way to avoid that cycle is to throw more money at EA so you can buy all the different forms of in game currency to accomplish things. No thank you. I’m sure there some some that enjoy this style of gaming, but I am not one of them. I’ll keep looking for something that’s closer to the original game.
Review by MauriceReeves on SimCity BuildIt.