Remember in my last post how I lamented over my disappointing summer? Well, during the quiet moments, I started playing a game called City Story. It’s a social network-based game along the lines of We Rule and God Finger. The flavor of the month this time is somewhat unexpected, though: City Planning… still with me? I know, eating chalk sounds more fun. But for what it’s worth, it’s engaging enough to have kept me coming back to play for several weeks. And I’ve learned a few tricks along the way.
TeamLava’s approach is a nice change of pace after playing several of Ngmoco’s games. They put more emphasis on social interaction, and the look of the game has a more upscale (albeit bubble-gum-pop) vibe. But yes, just like Ngmoco, TeamLava holds out their white-satin-gloved hands and asks for money in exchange for acceleration points. Rawr! In City Story, they’re called City Cash. Not to be confused with money you earn in the game, which is referred to as Coins or Bucks.
City Story Gameplay
First off, if you’ve played another social-based game – whether it’s a farm or a medieval kingdom – it’s essentially the same. The controls are different, the look is different, but the concept is nearly identical. In City Story, your goal is to grow your city from a wee community to a powerful sprawling metropolis. You earn money by manufacturing a variety of products in factories, which supports the growth of your city. Your city also has implied residents: you never actually see them, but there is a happiness barometer at the top of the screen to let you know how they’re feeling. Passive aggressive to the max!
City Story Ecosystem
Another difference between City Story and, say, We Rule, is the primitive ecosystem I mentioned above. The right balance of shops, businesses, parks, and amenities = happy residents. If you wonder whether or not your residents are happy, look no further than the big smiley face at the top of the screen. That’s the happiness barometer. As the balance tips the wrong way, the toothy smile turns into a grin, then a gray ghostly scowl, and worse after that. I have yet to see a mob of angry citizens chase through the streets though; there’s no consequence for having unhappy residents, except that everyone else can see your residents don’t like living there.
While you wait for your factories to churn out products, you might want to redecorate your city, or visit someone else’s city. Through icon-based editing panels, you can rearrange buildings, sell buildings back, or put them into inventory for later.
Another way to earn money is having other players visit your city to clean buildings. Don’t ask me about the logic behind it; it doesn’t make an ounce of sense to me! The groups of stars above your buildings indicate that you have money waiting to be collected. Simply tap the building to collect.
Where City Story Shines Above the Rest
There’s a few key areas where City Story impresses me. If you’ve played Ngmoco games, you’ll also fall in love with…
- Auto-adjusting street sections: there’s only one shape of “street” in City Story. And they’re free. You put it where you want it to go, and based on relative pieces of street, it connects the pieces seamlessly. Have only one piece of street? it makes a roundabout. Genius!
- Better Architecture: literally. The buildings are pretty to look at, even if there’s not much color variety. Everything lines up nicely, and the whole interface is zoomed in more than We Rule.
- Leave notes for other players on their message walls. It makes for difficult conversing, but it’s still more than Ngmoco provides at present.
- No annoying zoom-in-zoom-out flaw like We Rule suffers from, when you try to collect earnings quickly.
Tips for Playing City Story on the iPad
Here are a few tidbits to mull over when you start playing:
- Choose the right city name: It might determine how many visits you get from neighbors. There’s two main reasons: 1) your friends’ cities are listed in alphabetical order, and people will start at the top of the list and work their way down until they tire of it. 2) There’s a minor glitch in the interface which resets the list after you’ve visited a couple other cities. Imagine if you have 25+ neighboring cities and you have to scroll down and find the place you were at before? Not gonna happen. I end up doing a bunch at the top and bottom – and skipping ones in the middle. So, pick something that starts with A or Z, (or a space – that automatically gets sorted to the top!)
- A 4-star rating will give you a huge advantage in the eyes of potential neighbors. Think of it like the old art of attracting suiters. Look your best, and the ladies (or gents) will gravitate towards you. Inside tip: I haven’t been able to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But from my own playing experience, it seems that it takes longer for a solid 4-star rating to start dropping down than if you have a 3 or below.
- People may leave seemingly cryptic messages on your wall. “CYC” stands for “cleaned your city” and “NTC” means, “nothing to clean”.
Improvements Necessary
In order to really enjoy this game, there are a few fixes that are necessary. I hesitate to call them all design flaws; some of these are just my personal pet peeves:
- Please fix the neighbor list reset mentioned above
- Allow items to be sold directly from the inventory. It’s annoying as hell to have to make room in my city, then place all things I want to sell, and tap on them individually to sell them, then go back and replace the buildings I had there to start with. It makes my head hurt even typing it. Making people go through a hojillion taps to do a simple set of actions might keep them playing longer initially. But not in the long run.
- Consolidate the menus and make them consistent. Seriously, TeamLava if you want me to go all nuts, contact me and I will tell you specifically how to make the interface more usable. I don’t want to bore my precious readers.
- Make it obvious on the main neighbor list, which cities you still have cleanings available, and how many.
- Add a “request neighbor” button when visiting other cities.
- Make the server sync more frequently. Almost every session I play, the “oh darn!” popup notifies me it couldn’t connect to the server. Usually I have to do all of my earnings collections all over again after that.
- Tell me how much something is worth – before I sell it? I mean, really!
- Put in more user icon options
- I can’t collect cleaning money on factories until it’s done with the current contract
- The latest update including the Game Center sounds fun, but I don’t have the option in my menu.
Closing Thoughts on the City Story iPad game
So there you have it – everything you need to know about City Story, and then some. Assuming you’re a fan of this type of game, it should keep you plenty occupied for a few weeks. And even then, you can pick it up and put it down without completely destroying your game progress. I’ll give it a solid 3.5 stars, and might upgrade it to 4 if they fix the annoying flaws. However, until these games stop offering disguised in-app purchases, they’ll never get a 5-star rating from me.
Do you have tips that I missed? Share them in the comments! And please add me as your neighbor, by entering iPadFanatic as the storm id.
Next up: some very creative children’s stories, then another productivity tool. Stay tuned!
