You’ll need that money not only to enhance your structures and increase the city population, but also to pay for services-police, medical, fire, etc.-that they gradually demand over time. These two things are strongly intertwined, as happy citizens pay higher taxes (if only this were true in real life), which means more automatic coin earned each day. It’s all done to serve two main objectives: Keep your citizens happy, and continue amassing funds.

Rather, there’s always something to eventually do, once you earn or purchase enough coin. There’s always something to do, like upgrading a building or adding services. Over time, the upgrades require more of the advanced items to complete, which means a lot more time waiting for processes to finish. Often, you’ll just take those materials and pump them through other locations-the hardware store, or gardening supplies store-to create more advanced items and tools. You’ll need metal, wood, plastic, seeds, and more to feed into upgrading your buildings. Your main task is producing raw materials via factories. No surprise there: It’s a free-to-play game designed to make you check back every few minutes or hours-depending on your level of devotion and/or current tasks-to get anything done. SimCity BuildIt is SimCity in look and name, but it’s a lot simpler and more grinding in nature than the classic games that defined the franchise. Because what strikes me most about SimCity BuildIt is that your hours spent overseeing production chains and city layouts is ultimately rewarded with more obstacles, rather than opportunities.

And I’ll probably spend another week popping in here and there, but my initial interest has already faded. You can peek at friends’ games elsewhere-but can’t interact with them-giving you a glimpse at their perfect, beautiful cities while yours stagnates.Īfter those first few days, I spent a few more much less interested, but still going through the motions.

Simcity build it