It has been a very long time since I have anticipated the release of a game with so much excitement.  I’ve literally been searching the app store every morning to see if it is there yet.  I knew within 10 minutes of this game going live in the App store.  When it showed up, it was like a new gift showing up under the Christmas tree!   And, unlike many games that don’t quite live up to the anticipation (or utterly fail to do so), I have to say that Virtual City is no disappointment.  And I dare say that the 250,000 folks that tried out the free version won’t be disappointed either.

Virtual City, a G5 Entertainment release, is a successful port of a game available for other platforms.  I like it better than other games in the genre of Sim City because while the game does have its complexities, game play itself is not as cumbersome and doesn’t require memorizing huge poster-size technology trees.  It works so well on the iPhone touch screen that I’d have to say that it would likely be at the top of my list of purchases should I ever get an iPad.  The very intuitive pinching to zoom in and out and moving around on the map does not really require a full size screen though.

The premise of the game is simple.  Each of the 50 levels has a list of stated goals.  They can be accomplished in any order in order to complete that level.  There has to be order in the completion of each task though.  For example, your goal may be to send pies to the neighboring city.  In order to do that, you have to work out the dependencies of that goal.  You can’t just build a pie plant though.  You have to get grain delivered to the mill, flour from the mill and milk from the dairy farm to the bakery, and pies from the bakery to the next town.  This may require construction of roads or tunnels, trash pickup and delivery to the recycling center, additional homes for workers, and responses to natural disasters, fire, illness, and the eventual breakdown of equipment.

The dependencies are easy to figure out though as they are primarily transportation related.  If you click on a factory, it shows you what items it needs and what items it produces.  Items that are already being taken care of are checked off.  In effect, your goal is to deliver all the dependencies for each of the required items in a game.  It is more about connections and transportation than it is actual construction or utility infrastructure like other games of the genre.  The goals of the game are not just in the make & deliver category though.  Even the “make & deliver” goals depend on a proper balance of money, environment points, population, and community happiness.  It can be quite a job.  And, I have to say that from the standpoint of someone that was once  a project manager as a career, I found the “job” to be very enjoyable.  The focus on raw materials, manufacturing new items from them, and transportation is something that I find unique and refreshing and makes this game so much more than a clone of SimCity.  If you like games like SimCity, to which games of this genre are forced to compete with and be compared to, you will like this one as well.  I’d go so far as to say you might actually be like me and enjoy it better.

As I said before, Virtual City comes with 50 different levels across terrain found in 5 different states.  There are 7 different “production chains” to master (things as diverse as baking, printing, and cosmetics), multiple upgrades available for 50 different types of buildings, new technologies to unlock, and even 5 different “sandboxes” (to be added in the next release) that allow for free form play to your heart’s content.

I only have a couple of suggestions for the game.  I’d love to have an easy way to cycle through trucks, dumpsters, and buses and “follow” them around in the game to see where their pickups and drop-offs could be maximized.  While there is a way to select each item individually, there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily find which truck(s) visit a particular factory, for example, without clicking on every truck in the fleet to find out.  I’d love for there to be an option when I select a factory to see it’s current transportation.  It would make upgrading them easier.  My other suggestion would be to clarify something in the tutorials.  I know that a garbage truck (a “dumpster”) can visit multiple places and deliver at a single location (the recycling center), but does that stretch to other kinds of trucks as well, and what is the limit?  It appears that I’m limited to a single destination, but is there a limit to the number of “pick-ups” before I get there?  I figured it out by trial and error, but it would have been nice if it had been spelled out in a clear fashion in the tutorial.  Finally, I’d love to see a better way to tell what parts of your infrastructure are not needed for a particular level’s goals.  Early on, I deleted a factory that I didn’t realize I needed and could not find a way to re-build it.  What I was wanting to do wasn’t part of the level’s goals/tutorial, but I’d hate to make that mistake on something important and be forced to re-start a level.

You can download a teaser version with the first four levels for free (takes about half an hour to complete), but my recommendation is to skip that and go right for the full game.  At an introductory price of $2.99, it is guaranteed to bring you hours and hours of gaming pleasure.  I’d hurry though, as the price is going up on September 13th.  This game is one of the few that makes my “Must Have” list and I could not recommend it any more highly.