There's something almost mesmeric about Rocket Valley Tycoon. Watching trains skitter around, picking up and dropping off the goods you need to make the titular valley thrive, as clouds slowly drift above is a pleasant experience.
But there's more to the game than the slightly spaced out feeling it can give you. You're building an intricate web of stations, factories, and mines, doing your best to exploit the landscape for profit. And it's an awful lot of fun.
Rocket personThe game mixes together ideas from a bunch of different genres. There's a good deal of simulation here, but it's presented in a more casual, idle package. It's got the beat of a clicker, wrapped up in a much deeper experience.
The focus is on completing tech trees. You start off just cutting down trees, but before long you're working towards creating circuit boards and other items that you need to start firing rockets into space.
There's a settlement amongst all the industry too, and you need to keep the inhabitants happy as well. They'll ask for items to help with their development, and you'll get big rewards when you supply them all.
If it sounds like a lot of things to juggle, that's because it is. But the simplicity of the mechanics here means the game never gets overwhelming, and you've always got one eye on the prize thanks to some smart progression trees.
As you build you'll earn more money, unlock new areas of the map and new cities to upgrade. Everything pushes along at a decent pace, and once you get into the beat of things, it's hard not to drop in every day for a quick play.
Sure, it doesn't have the chops of a full sim-style game, but it doesn't need them. This is an experience that rewards you for how much or how little you put in, and in that respect it's basically perfect for mobile.
Wood and copperAre there problems? Yeah. Some people are definitely going to be put off by the free to play mechanics, but in all honesty they're some of the least intrusive I've seen in a while. You could also argue that it takes too long to actually get to the point where you're making rockets, but that's maybe personal choice.
At the end of the day, Rocket Valley Tycoon sets out to join together the very big and the very small, and for the most part the resulting game is a blast. And yes, that was a rocket pun.