On top of this, the graphics are sharp and detailed, with real distinction between early buildings and the later structures that dominate your landscape. Building up your city and watching income and population skyrocket over time is rewarding, and the enforced slow pace makes returning to it a frequent guilty pleasure. And for an objective-driven game, Virtual City Playgrounds is surprisingly reluctant to tell you how it works in the first place.ĭespite, and possibly because of, the way it's been designed in terms of pacing, it's undeniably an addictive game. Selecting buildings is quite fiddly on the small screen, too, often causing you to select the wrong thing. You get a pop-up cheerfully celebrating your ability to follow instructions, and the opportunity to share your brilliance on Facebook. If you're asked to build a bus route to get people from A to B, the game won't object if both stops are next door to each other. This would be forgivable if the game left Sim City for dust, but Virtual City Playground doesn't really care how you complete an objective, just so long as you do it. Bundles of these cost between £1.33 and £63.89. All are either paid for, accumulated over time, or given as blood money for Facebook spam.įor the most part you can trundle along without paying for or sharing the game, but there comes a point when you'll have to pay one way or another, because expanding your play area requires more investment points than you can achieve through hard graft.
You can go off-piste and build what the hell you like, but only if you either repeatedly post to Facebook like an obsessive socially-unaware fiend or stump up real money for extra in-game credits to buy the out-of-bounds buildings.Ĭurrency comes in three forms: energy, money, and invest points. You even micro-manage the bus routes and bin collection in the city, following a tutorial/mission list that requires you to build things in a structured fashion for rewards and achievements.Īn early example sees you building a pie factory to supply the shopping centre, which means you need a farm and dairy before you crimp your first pastry. Using the touchscreen for building and road placement, you gradually kit out your new settlement with all the amenities it'll need: shopping centres, hospitals, and the like. Play (if you've got) doughĪnd so we have Virtual City Playground. Cue the rise of the freemium game, funded by micro-transactions. With the rise of smartphone apps, people are rightly dismissive of £40 games, but as competition forces prices beyond rock bottom, anything more than 10p per hour of engrossing entertainment is often seen as a rip-off.Īs more apps are given away, developers have realised they need other ways of making up the costs. The history, economics, and psychology of game pricing are fascinating.
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