[typing]
Remember SimCity Social?
The Facebook game from 2012 that had you constructing buildings with huge waiting times,
bugging your friends with hot air balloons,
and was shut down not even a year later?
Well, I hope you liked that!
Because as of October 2014, there's a new free-to-play SimCity game
known as SimCity BuildIt
from Track Twenty and Electronic Arts.
This time around, it's an app for iOS and Android,
and as I said, it's free to play,
which means it's chock-full of microtransactions and arbitrary timers.
As usual for these kind of games, the introduction is promising.
You've got a friendly tutorial
and *just* enough resources to get you intrigued
before it slaps you in the face with a timer and a paywall.
[deep sigh]
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
But anyway, let's just assume for a moment
that you actually enjoy this genre of build-and-wait games for mobile devices,
and in that case, SimCity BuildIt is quite a pretty one–
all things considered.
So it's got that going for it!
Aesthetically, it's hugely inspired by SimCity 5 from 2013,
which makes sense, seeing as they already had those assets lying around, doing nothing.
It also features the fantastic soundtrack from that game
by Chris Tilton, which is another huge plus.
[orchestral music]
Also, the user interface and touch- focused design is well-thought-out
and perfectly suits even smaller touch devices.
I'm playing this on my Samsung Galaxy Note Edge,
which features a 5.6-inch screen,
and I never feel cramped playing it.
But naturally, it'd be even better on a tablet.
I must give Track Twenty props for the controls and UI here.
It doesn't get in the way and provides you with clear and concise information at all times.
Of course, it owes a lot of that design to SimCity 5,
which I always thought felt like a tablet game all along.
So that's appropriate!
That game was so streamlined and simplified that it hurt.
But that's because it was a SimCity game on the PC.
On a mobile device, your expectations are different.
So things like the decreased city size, simple UI and limited scope
make a lot of sense.
The basic goal and progression closely mimics its big brother as well.
You start by plopping down roads, a power plant, and the town hall.
Then you move on to placing residential lots,
factories, shops, parks, fire and police stations, and all that jazz.
Grow a larger population,
gain more Simoleans,
upgrade and expand, there you go.
The main difference here is that, like in SimCity Social,
you place individual buildings instead of zones,
and each building has to have an arbitrary amount of random resources to be constructed.
And you'll need even more resources in order to upgrade these buildings
beyond trailer parks and tin-roofed shacks.
You gain these resources several different ways,
but the main one is by producing them in buildings that produce things,
like factories and hardware stores.
And what do *they* use to produce these resources?
Yes, time.
The most valuable and mineral-rich resource known to free-to-play gaming,
and I hate it.
Everything costs time.
Unless you have the money, of course,
and by that, I mean real-world money.
Spend a ludicrous amount of cash to gain a pittance of in-game rewards
that you can spend in two minutes.
Otherwise, you could wait for days in order for more money to come rolling in,
after the in-game timers run out.
Now, to be fair, SimCity Social was a far worse offender in this regard that BuildIt.
At least here you're not annoying your friends for clicks and resources,
and it's not quite on the same level of lacking activities
while you're waiting on timers to tick down.
There are things to do, like visiting friends and going to the global trade market,
which allows you to gain cash by selling excess resources
and buy resources with said cash.
Also random events which provide you with more resources,
and leveling up and achievements that toss you bits of resources and cash.
But this really just makes me feel like a dog, begging for table scraps,
rather than a powerful mayor of a thriving city.
That palpable sense of progression and satisfaction from the SimCity games
is all but eliminated here,
because the better you do, the more you have to pay up,
either with money or time.
Each lot is going to require exponentially more water,
power, fire, police, health services,
happiness items, construction resources,
and God knows what else in order to stay alive!
And setbacks like disasters and badly-chosen resource production
only serve to ruin my day!
Because they haven't provided me a fun challenge to overcome, like in SimCity.
No, all they've done here is take up my time,
the most valuable resource in this game,
and in real life, period.
Now trust me, I understand the appeal of these things,
and being on a mobile device makes a lot more sense than being on a PC,
where you could easily play anything better.
But as far as my tastes go,
I would rather play and idle game like Cookie Clicker or Adventure Capitalist
than play a build-and-wait game like this.
At least with those, it's whittled down to the most basic compulsive gameplay imaginable,
with the least amount of time investment required.
Instead of playing with my heart
by dangling the lure of SimCity in front of me,
only to skewer me on a metal hook and bash my head in once I'm caught.
And if you enjoyed this video on SimCity BuildIt
and would like to see, I don't know, anything else that I've done,
then, uh, click on some of these here.
I've done a lot of other videos. These are just a couple.
And you can always just check my channel or subscribe
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And there are new videos every Monday and Friday.
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as well as support the show on Patreon.
And as always, thank you very much for watching.