Something a little different. While Pocket City 2 is available on macOS it is not a proper port of the game and is clearly labelled as designed for iPad/iPhone. A desktop version is intended to follow later and could take a while. Despite this I was in the mood for a bit of city building and thought what the hell, it’s cheap.
The controls currently resemble the mobile release a little too closely. To enable zoom I had to go into the top bar menu and in settings make sure ‘touch alternatives’ was switched on. Now I can hold down an arrow key and drag the mouse to zoom in and out. The other area where controls are an issue is driving around the city where two hands on the screen is expected. Trying to do this with the mouse is messy. Using a vehicles turbo is impossible. Although I was still able to beat all the mini games regardless. Some just barely. Other than that the controls are fine and it’s been fun.
But what is it actually like? As it looks – a classic grid based city sim with the added fun of free roaming in 3D with my character avatar, the mayor. It has all the usual buildings plus some mega projects like zoos and a space centre. The basic zoning options, public transport, maintenance costs, and disasters (volcanos, meteors, etc). There is enough variety in the building and scenery choices to theme a few cities.
Pocket City 2 is frankly an easy casual game. There are Easy, Hard, and Expert modes. My first city was Hard which was easy. My second was Expert which was easy. I’m not having a go. When mucking about with the second city I was far more focused on moving every individual building to maximise space efficiency and get something that looks good to my eye. A couple of simple money making schemes, go wander in the forest and open chests, meant I had zero worries and cracked on with setting up utopia. Also did a bit of farming disasters for research points.
I’m happy with this being a casual time sink and would like future updates to focus on increasing the cosmetic items such as mountains, trees, etc. There’s something about creating a living giant diorama that appeals to me. More difficulty options could be fun too but not essential for me.
There is a surprising amount of content here for what looks like a small devs game with no in-app purchases. It’s genuinely good value. With nice details like citizens saying goofy stuff about their lives and taxes, and random interactions that can bag more XP.
About those jank mobile driving controls. Doing the race event where I need to finish first; without the ability to use turbo it felt impossible. Until I built a light rail network all over town centre and the race route was slap in the middle of it. The other cars kept smashing into the rail infrastructure and I got an easy win. Cheesed it and don’t care. Gimme the money and I throw up another ferris wheel.
One performance problem arose after lengthy sessions and when my city got large. I experienced some lagging when doing the mini games. Especially something like ‘demolition’ where I’m tearing the city apart in a speeding bulldozer. I got the spinny wheel a few times but was always able to continue my game. I spotted that a recent patch mentions memory optimisation, so I think the devs are on the case.
As far as city building goes I put plenty of time into unlocking most of the buildings and got absorbed in designing the landscape, down to changing the land and water locations. Many trees were placed. It can’t quite compete with the biggest names in the genre, yet has a plucky charm that won me over.
Available from the App Store and mobile stores.
mishmash 