A Game Review, by Super Searcher
SimCity BuildIt is a spin-off game of the SimCity series for iOS and Android released by Electronic Arts in December 2014. As a free mobile game, it’s a fairly simple version of other SimCity games, with more screen touching. You can pinch, zoom, and rotate 360 degrees as you manage your 3-D city, both day and night, online and offline (although if you play offline, you won’t be able to use the community market).
You start with some money and are told by your adviser to build certain things such as homes and factories to make building supplies. After you get things rolling you begin to find out the limitations of this game, such as the need for more coins, or once you get a city going you run out of space to build more stuff.
You can slowly buy additional space by gathering special building supplies that you can obtain at random, or buying on the community market from other players. There’s not much to do besides continuing to build and build… and build. All the while you continue to “level up” your city, which adds more building supplies and more public desired things, like fire and police stations.
One fun thing to do in the game is when you get a high enough population, you can go to the local mad scientist and have him try out one of his many disasters on your city in exchange for gold keys that unlock population-boosting tourist attractions like Big Ben and the Empire State Building.
Finally, you will have to make sure all your citizens are happy; otherwise you won’t go very far very fast. To do that you will need to balance services like utilities, roads, and parks along with challenges like traffic, fires, and pollution.
I’ve been playing SimCity BuildIt for a few weeks, and frankly I’m getting a bit bored. It’s gone from building a new city to a repetitive move-and-place experience. You also have to wait for sometimes hours before you can build again, because you ran out of the needed supplies and need to make more at the factory. All in all I think it’s a fun game, for the first few weeks. But once you get to a certain point you’ll probably lose interest.