Megacity Empire: New York

When we first played SimCity on PC all those years ago, it seemed like we'd reached the pinnacle of gaming. An entire moving, living city for you to dabble with, right down to its tiniest detail. Frankly, if you'd told us we'd be downloading the game through the air to play on an absurdly tiny mobile phone some 18 years later, our young '80s self would have snorted in disbelief before turning up Starship on our Walkman.

Of course, Megacity Empire: New York isn't actually SimCity. But come on, Gameloft, it's pretty similar. Not that this is any criticism at all, especially when the developer has so successfully nailed the city management simulation and delivers it in such a smart and pretty package.

There are two play modes in the game: a free play-style option and a mission-based mode. The mission game is likely to be where you'll spend the most time because it's really the mode best suited to mobile. While building up an attractive, successful city from scratch does have some appeal, it's trying to further establish and build on an existing one that carries the kudos. Every mission has its objectives – from building stadia and successfully keeping invading football hooligans at bay, to maintaining investors in your city happy by ensuring all of their needs are fulfilled – and, without exception, all 15 missions will have you completely addicted.

The game's basics are simple. Cities need three types of zones to succeed: residential, commercial and office. These are built up by simply selecting the type of building your city requires and the size of the development (large or small) that you think the area can sustain. After that, fine-tuning the running of your city comes down to laying roads, building subways and delivering a whole range of utilities, from landfill sites and fire stations, to recreational areas and schools.

If a section of the city is crying out for a hospital, it lets you know about it via unhappy face icons that spring out of buildings. You can also quickly check an area is well catered for using the game's very handy mini-map, which gives you a bird's eye view of how everything is divided up, as well as enabling you to filter individual building types and jump to areas of the city.

Controlling everything is also very straightforward. The nub or usual keys takes care of moving a cursor around and the only other inputs you need are '5' (which brings up a menu of buildings when you press it over a blank area or makes it possible to view a building's statistics if you're hovering over one), and the left soft key (which brings up various city statistics options).

For the most part, the controls work perfectly. We only had a problem when trying to lay roads from the fiddly isometric viewpoint and having them go the wrong way. Having to find a spare bit of land to click on before the game brings up the build menu is slightly annoying too, because if you're near a road or building the game assumes you want the info on that instead.

Those are the only complaints you'll hear from us about the game, though. Everything else is supremely well designed and the pace of the game ramps up the size of your city and the difficulty gradually, while unlocking new buildings and objectives in order to keep you hooked.

At times you feel like you're dashing from one disaster to the next, putting out fires and building police stations, but that's the joy of the experience. Mission mode doesn't allow for sedate town planning – it's all about squeezing in time to ensure your commercial zones are making money and there are enough people to satisfy employment demands. That's the appeal. With only a set number of years to complete your population, as well as money-driven objectives, it's a race against the clock.

Megacity Empire has stiff competition from EA's recently released SimCity Societies, and it's unlikely you'd want to buy both. Ultimately, either game is brilliant, though. This one occasionally feels a bit slapdash, perhaps, as if you just need to plonk down the right building in the right area without giving any thought to presentation. But its missions are such a perfect challenge and so completely addictive that you'll instantly overlook such matters.

The point we're building up to, then, is we recommend it unreservedly to all aspiring town planners.