City Story

[djflippy]

Freemium, universal Social City clone.

Watch out for cash purchase options, in-line with citybux purchases.

[dboeren]

I downloaded this yesterday and it's actually pretty fun if you like these sort of games.

Good points:
1. WAY less work than for instance Zombie Farm. You can set up notifications when you need to "harvest" your factories, there are only a few of them, and they're typically all going to be making the same thing together so you can harvest them together. All you're really doing here is earning gold coins to buy your buildings, and once purchased your buildings are permanent.
2. Social aspect NOT crippling for a change. I don't do Facebook, and most MMO games hose you if you don't sign up a bunch of friends. This one doesn't.
3. You can move items after building, you can put them in storage. In other words, you're not punished for trying out different layouts. This is the real appeal of the game to me: designing my city and continuing to modify and improve it over time as I gain more space, money, and access to new buildings. It looks good and you can spend a lot of time redesigning things, especially right after you purchased a city size upgrade.

Small bad points:
1. Can't collect the bonuses for cleaned Factories while they're making stuff (which is most of the time)
2. You can rotate buildings, but only to two facings and not all four

Larger bad points:
1. You can't get more city bucks any way except spending real-world money. There is no exchange rate to turn gold coins into city bucks. I accidentally converted my starting cache of city bucks (10) into gold coins (40,000) and can't go back. This sucks!
2. Doesn't tell you enough about the consequences of your actions (see #1). For instance, when you sell items it doesn't tell you how much you'll get. Just sell it and then I hope you're happy with the very small amount of gold coins. You can gift buildings to your neighbors (friends), it doesn't say whether this costs anything. Turns out it doesn't, but I was worried it would cost the same as buying the building for yourself. AND, the aforementioned bit that it doesn't inform you that converting city bucks into gold coins is one way only.

A few hints starting out:
1. Never sell anything. You get so little back it's not worth it.
2. Gifts don't cost anything, send them freely.
3. Avoid buying too many of the following items which are common gifts:
Cafe, Park, Cozy House, Playground. You'll probably get what you need for free.
4. Clean other people's cities (this is the social aspect). Be sure to post on their wall so they're more likely to return the favor. Also, concentrate on people with 3-4 stars, they're more likely to return the favor. Avoid cleaning factories unless there are no other buildings (since you can't collect from them until their job's done)

Going forward, now that I've discovered how the things work that the game doesn't really tell you about I only really have two complaints left. There should be a way to convert coins into city bucks (even if it takes a lot of them), and of course more stuff to put in your city! I've tried and deleted a number of similar social games, I think this one has the potential to stick around if they can keep releasing more content so that we'll want to keep monkeying with our cities to add the latest buildings. Of course I don't expect them to have a ton more buildings this close to release, but I also get tired of seeing the same buildings everywhere or cities with twenty copies of the same coffee shop.

Anyway, if you're like me and like the idea of city building but hated the other games that make it feel like a chore then check out City Story. It's free, so what's your excuse?