Facebook Game Review: Super City build your own city on Facebook
Super City Game Basics (3 out of 5)
Super City is another installment in the latest genre trend on Facebook the city building game. Super City puts you in position of mayor with your own virtual city. This game also shows people moving about your city as you build it. You have many building options such as various houses, businesses, municipal buildings and decorative items. During game play you must also supply your city with additional power after you have built a few buildings which adds more strategy to the game. If you have Facebook friends you can visit their cities and even steal their money or slow down their building process.
Game Interface (4 out of 5)
Super City looks quite nice for a Facebook game and you initially start with a small play area that you can expand upon later on. At the top left you will find your game coins and any game cash if you have it. To the far right you will find your experience bar, level and number of people currently in your city. Below that you will find Andy the game tutorial avatar as well as options to take a snapshot and view the game full screen. At the lower left is the main build icons, road building icon, and bulldozer to remove trees. The build icon can be expanded to reveal all the different building options in the game. New options will become available as you level up and gain experience. The graphics are decent but the game can slow down some with all the sim people moving around your city.
Building Your Super City (4 out of 5)
Super City features many different buildings you can add to your growing city. For homes you have the residence, apartment complex, condominium, farmhouse, villa, and manors well as others. Businesses feature things such as the shop, mall, and business center. Municipal buildings include the schools police station, power plant, and bank. Your city residents can get some recreation too with parks, playgrounds and the museum. Periodically you will also need to do repairs to buildings which will deduct game coins from your account.
Decorating Your City (2 out of 5)
There are not many decorative options available in Super City besides some trees and a bridge. Not only are the decorative items lacking but the tress are very expensive. I can remove tress on the map with my bulldozer for free yet a simple tree costs $3000 in game coins. There are no benches, street lamps, or any other sort of decoration available in the game. The decorative aspect of this game falls flat and the high cost of a simple tree is annoying.
Building Construction Time (1 out of 5)
One of the negatives in this game is a very long building time. As you construct buildings they go through a construction stage. The first house you can build is the studio residence which takes four hours to build completely. This turns Super City into a waiting game and decreases the fun factor for me as a player. I can see waiting for buildings as you level up but when you first start out waiting four hours for a simple building is not very fun. You want to be able at least see some progress in your city so you get excited about continuing the game with Super City all you do is wait. The highest residence will takeover four days to complete. Most people don’t have this type of time to play a game on Facebook so the long wait time is a huge drawback for the new player. You can “hire builders” with each building but this costs additional game coins and you must hire them at each stage of the building process so you need to baby-sit your buildings to get them completed in less time.
Playing With Facebook Friends (5 out of 5)
One highlight of this games is the ability to play with your Facebook friends and use some strategy too. You can visit your Friends cities and attempt to steal their money. When you visit their cities simply click on buildings and see if there is rent money there and you can attempt to steal it. Another option you have is to slow down the building process of a friends city. You can do this by clicking their buildings and using the radial menu to offer their workers a “hamburger” The workers will stop to eat and your friend must click on that building to get the construction started again. Both stealing and slowing down construction offers strategy to this game and gives you something to do when visiting your friends city.
City Expansions (4 out of 5)
Thankfully in this game you don’t need multiple Facebook friends just to expand your city. Expansions in this game merely cost game coins so you can quickly get a larger sized city. After you get your initial expansion the next level will unlock and you can keep expanding. You can also use game cash to buy a few more elaborate buildings for your city.
Conclusion
This game could be a very good city sim game if it wasn’t for the long wait times and cost of decorative items. The game does feature some nice interaction with your gaming friends and expanding your city is easy and inexpensive. If the developers decrease the extreme building times for your first buildings the game will improve which I hope is done in the future. Super City can still be fun and it may appeal to those who just want to play occasionally.
