Tiny City

Just when I was thinking to myself, "boy, I haven't played a town builder in a good long while", along comes Tiny City from Chillingo.

I've been craving one of these for a good few weeks actually, and it's nice to get a chance to review one that looks, from its App Store and Google Play product page at least, like a fairly middle-of-the-road kind of builder.

Even Chillingo's own description of the game doesn't try to amp up your expectations.

Apparently, you see, it's "the latest town building sim for your mobile." It's not "the most exciting", it's not "the most innovative". It's "the latest".

This might not make it sound particularly wild, but I, for one, derive a great deal of pleasure from this most casual of game types. So, yes, I'm pleased to be spending the next seven days of my life with it and reporting back to you my findings.

I have not been disappointed with Tiny City thus far. Instead, in fact, my expectations have been met exactly.

Tiny City introduces you to its basic concepts and then allows you to get on with building your city. You create houses to increase the number of citizens you have.

They need shops, and farms, and whatnot, of course, so you build them for them. You can upgrade the government building, too, so that you have access to more types of buildings.

I'm currently expanding the area with which I have to work by chopping down large swathes of forest so that the land might be developed on in future.

Though there's an awful lot of deforestation going on, the game is keen on you building clean energy resources, growing food locally, and renovating old buildings rather than letting old ones crumble. I genuinely think that's neat.

Other than this, though, I'm at the early stages of play. So, I'm having to spend lots of time ensuring that the backbone buildings of my society are in place... and counting down timers while that backbone is constructed.

After a few more days with Tiny City, I'm already convinced that there's not a great deal here for people who have already played a similar building game, as it hasn't progressed past the familiar formula of build, plant, wait, harvest, build.

The UI isn't the simplest example in the genre, nor the fastest to use. City builders thrive on being quick access: you fire them up as you sit on the train to work, quickly go about collecting your revenues, begin a few more projects, and then quit out. This one doesn't easily allow you to do that.

For example, when you're creating new structures in Tiny City, placing the building exactly where you want is a slow process, because the camera tends to zoom in so far that swiping about the environment becomes laborious.

It's not a pretty beast either, and while the 2D art is good enough, there's little in the way of movement and life to the city you build, nor many ways to personalise and make it your own.

There are two neat additions that I do like though.

If you create a building away from a road, the game will automatically lay down a path of tarmac to that location, and that's great for people like me, who rarely feel the impetus to neatly connect my town.

The other aspect I like is a button which, when double-tapped, instantly collects all the money from every building in your game. It's a really smart little time saver.

Right now I'm continuing to check off the tasks in my list, which is giving me a good deal of direction, but I'm hoping that in the next few days Tiny City surprises me with something truly unique.

Oh dear. Tiny City has become a dreadful bore over the last couple of days.

The challenges that were keeping me entertained have begun to repeat themselves. Instead of building one school and upgrading it twice, then, I'm building four schools and upgrading them eight times.

It wouldn't be quite such a problem if I had a bit more money and resources with which to play. The fact is, though, that I only get about 30 seconds of play before I've done absolutely everything I can. You run out of money to buy buildings quickly, and the same can be said for the energy and people needed to power them.

Short bursts of play are fine, but when you come back to the game a couple of hours later, you won't have amassed many resources, making it an uphill struggle to get anything done.

Free-to-play games need a rhythm, a pattern for the player to fall into so that she keeps coming back. Tiny City doesn't have one.

I can purchase very powerful buildings with Gold - and this has alleviated the problem somewhat - but it's only a short-term solution.

When the game introduces locked chests that almost demand premium currency to open, you begin to think you've had enough. When it starts pushing you out of the app and into your browser, AND starts pleading for permission to post to your Facebook wall, you know that that's the case.

There are loads of builder games on the various app stores. And since a lot of them are better than this, why anyone would spend any of her time or money on Tiny City is beyond my comprehension.