One of the problems with having no access to a personal PC is the dearth of games to play on a phone. Some may like FPS on iPhone or Android but if I’m playing a FPS, I want a controller in my hand or a keyboard in easy access.
…thus I stick to city-builders and slow sedate games like simulators that allow me to think with whatever “diminished capacity” I have for cognitive processes.
One of these city-builders that I’m looking at a fresh start with is called City Island 4. I haven’t played the three previous games from Sparkling Society Games B.V. so I have absolutely bumsquat to go on in terms of experience with this game. Judging by the rating on the Apple App Store.which is a 4.6 out of a possible 5, evidently it’s rated pretty highly. And there a quite a number of five star reviews in any case which means that customer expectations have been met insofar as “interesting gameplay”.
Now this post will be an ongoing post as I play and review this game as a brand new city builder that if I like it, it’s ease of controls and functional UI, I may even put it on the PC that I replace. But for now, I’m going to take a trial run through it and see if it’s something that I can make a series of reviews about as I set about building this city from the ground up.
We start off on the main island of Pleasant Plains, a nice little wooded island in which to start our city. From here as we build up our city we can expand out to these other islands as we “find”…er…unlock them.
The UI is relatively easy to navigate and simple to get an idea of what you need to do to get into the game quickly. It has a handy tutorial which will guide you through the process of getting acquainted with what you need to do. Watch out for the houses that are built using gold. I wasn’t aware of which one I was selecting (user error) and blew through most of my gold so just be careful of which buildings you select. The firehall requires gold to build and luckily I had enough to build it. I dug myself a hole, but fortunately this is a straight, simple city builder with the player only having to mind the employment level and citizen happiness in the game. Make sure you have enough jobs to go around, decorations to look at and entertainment and your citizens will be blissfully happy nearly all the time.
It is however,really tricky to maintain a completely happy citizenry as certain things are going to end up taking some time to unlock and shifting resources where they can affect the most people is clearly something that will take some fiddling with to get the right balance.
Over all the limitations of the iOS framework does show through in the fact that this is not a full-featured game. It’s for the person who wants that little bit of a kick in the morning to get his brain working after waking up on the bus commute to work or school or just to relax. For those of us who want something more full-featured, stick with PC games (unless like me, you’re on an enforced hiatus from playing due to a broken down computer).
I give it a solid 4 out of 5 for gameplay.
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