Take everything you know about the city building genre, strip it down to the realistic, nitty-gritty essentials and package it into a mobile game that’s meant to be intuitive and easy to use, and you’ve basically got Pocket City. This game brings all of the challenges of your standard city builder, but with no thematic elements to color the experience, no wild variations on the genre, and no sub-games. You’re in charge of building up and managing a city, and in doing so, you’ll be using an interface that’s extremely simple and gets out of your way to let you take care of all the intricacies.
Pocket City has everything a basic city building game needs, in the best possible way of saying so. You’ll start out with a small town and face administrative challenges, financial struggles, natural disasters, zoning decisions and population and tourism management as your city expands and becomes ever greater. This game is not an island-themed city builder, it’s not built around a well-known franchise, and you won’t be doing any RPG-style battling; this is a pure and simple city builder, with all the fixings. There are no microtransactions or energy systems of any sort in place, even in the free version. It’s even playable offline and in either portrait or landscape modes. The game will see you unlocking new building and terrain types as you advance, and you’ll have to manage your citizens’ happiness to create a thriving city. You’ll do so by mitigating all sorts of disasters, holding special events, and both raising and using city money judiciously to keep the quality of life high. Cloud saving is also on board, allowing you to move between devices as needed and take your metropolis with you. You can even transfer it onto another device directly, even across accounts, and share it with friends.
This game has a free version, as mentioned above. The standard version runs $4.99, but those looking to save the price of a large latte will have to deal with ads and a few of the more advanced features missing in action. Both versions are great experiences for fans of the genre, so if you happen to enjoy city building games and are looking for something more distilled and less grandiose or quirky than other entries in the mobile market, hit the Google Play button below.
