Instead, players must use their factories to farm resources to build up their residential areas.

This isn’t a traditional SimCity game, and there is very little city management to do beyond remembering to not put a factory right in the middle of a residential area. Like most check-back-in-ten-minutes-for-your-resources games, SimCity BuildIt forces players to wait various chunks of time for various types of resources. Planning out the neighborhoods that quickly begin to sprout into towns and then grow into cities wouldn’t be so bad if my involvement with the construction of my city was more, well, involved.

SimCity Neighborhood PlanIt just doesn’t have the same ring to it though. It leans more towards being a puzzle game where you spend a lot of time waiting to get the pieces of a neighborhood to put together. Contrary to the name, SimCity BuildIt isn’t really a simulator game. I may have only been a goofy ten-year-old, but I wielded the powers of the gods mercilessly.īut times have changed, a decade and a half has gone by, and here we are with a new SimCity.Īpproaching SimCity BuildIt expecting a similar experience to previous SimCity titles is going to leave you disappointed. When half the city was rioting in the streets and the other half was moving to a neighboring city, I frustratingly ushered in a dozen tornadoes, rained space junk down upon the protestors, and I think I even summoned swarms of locusts in. Turns out, ten-year-olds do not make good mayors. My family’s first PC came with SimCity 3000, and ten-year-old me spent tons of time building up a city and then destroying it when my city management skills proved futile.

I have fond memories of the SimCity franchise. Takes a long time to make substantial progress. A watered-down version of the traditional SimCity game.

Simcity old version