We City is a very impressive world-builder game (or in this case, city-builder game) where you design and essentially manage a city from the ground up. Because of the limitations of working off a small touch screen phone, the results aren’t always what they could be, but for the medium, We City is a more-than-worthy free app.
With games such as these, a strong tutorial is a must. In this respect, We City does a decent-enough job. The app holds your hand through the initial stages of the game, and as you level up, you’ll be notified of additions to your building abilities.
Unfortunately, if you’ve never had much experience (or success) with these sorts of games, We City probably won’t change that. It still will take a keen eye for placement and an understanding for when to build specific structures at certain points.
We City tries its best to keep your aspirations grounded, at first by offering only a small patch of land for development, offering to let you grab up more land only once you’ve earned enough experience, but it still can be easy to turn your blossoming city into a hopeless quagmire.
One of We City’s more interesting features concerns a social networking component that could prove to make the game worth playing over the long haul. Instead of creating your city in a bubble, the app allows you to share your city with friends who also have the We City app. Once your friends are signed on, you’re able to visit each other’s cities and unlock a sort of game within the game. For those who aren’t as skilled with building, visiting other cities might prove to be the hook that gets them into We City in the first place.
Despite its sometimes clunky design, this is an admirable app to find on the iPhone. Although I suspect it would work better with on an iPad, thanks to the larger screen, there’s still a lot to like here if you can get over the idea that there might be a fair amount of trial and error as you build your city.
