Take Me Down
I’m going to Kentucky this weekend, and my queue of blog posts will run out about that time as well. According to plan, I should be reading and writing, adding things to the queue, but with this dark thing looming on the horizon, I haven’t felt up to it. Instead, I’ve been down in Pocket City 2, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.
My history with city builders is almost as old as that song. I played the original SimCity on my Zenith 286 SuperSport (monochrome LCD, baby!) in 1989, and I loved it. Not only was it just a beautifully designed game, but it also introduced me to a whole new genre of computer gaming, where I was trying to build something instead of running around blasting things. I made city after city, and some version of SimCity has been in gaming repertoire ever since.
The original Pocket City was a nice mobile SimCity clone, but my experience with it was that it was pretty basic. I would play it, and then think, man, I really should be playing Cities: Skylines, which was at the time my go-to city builder, mostly because Pocket City would get me thinking about different things I could do and build in the other game. There wasn’t anything wrong with Pocket City; it was nicely designed and programmed, and if you’d never played a city builder, it would make a wonderful introduction to the genre. As someone who has built miles upon miles of roads, though, it was pretty old hat.
Now Pocket City 2 is out, and for me at least, it has snagged the crown from Cities as the best city builder. For five bucks, it’s one of the nicest mobile games I’ve ever played. There are a couple of weird little bugs here and there, including one that sort of impacts gameplay, but overall it is incredibly well polished and put together. And there is so much to do, with features packed into every corner.
Pocket City 2 is a regression, in a way, going back to SimCity 2000. The view is a top-down, 3-D isometric perspective. You can freely pinch-and-zoom in and out, and on my 12 Mini the zoom is buttery smooth. You cannot rotate the view, however, which surprised me. Usually with a view like this, you want to be able to rotate the map to be able to see “behind” buildings, particularly when say a tall office building is blocking your view of an intersection. PC2 gets around this by ghosting the building slightly, so that you can sort of see the intersection, but several times I was demolishing and building in what I felt was a somewhat blind manner. Everything went fine, and to be honest, I felt comfortable working blind because the game is very forgiving about fixing mistakes.
What makes the lack of rotation more interesting is that the reason why the zoom is so buttery smooth is because the whole city is rendered in 3D. At any point, you can drag and drop your avatar to a spot on the map, and then go into a 3rd person over the shoulder perspective as you walk through your city. The art style is slightly cartoony with a purposefully lower polygon count on the models to give them a more hand-drawn appearance, but once you start walking through, you realize that what you’ve been looking down on is what you get.
And here is where the developer of this game really struck gold, in my opinion: they packed the map full of things to do. Mini-games get unlocked as you build different buildings. If you build the Retro Arcade, for example, you unlock a Laser Tag game. You also unlock different vehicles in free roam, and drive and fly around the city at will. You can go into shops and buy things. You can go into buildings and interact with things. There are loot boxes scattered around randomly.
There are characters who will ask you to do quests for them, in return for items and experience. My favorite is Eddie, the “engineer”. While most of the characters ask you to do things that help your city, like stop crime or fight fires, Eddie wants you to inflict disasters on your city, for, you know, science. A burning citizen runs down the street screaming, “Why would the Mayor do this to us?” And I shrug, ‘cause Eddie asked me to. And afterwards his response is a very scientific “Yippee!”
With nearly every city builder, you hit a now what point. I’ve filled the map, I’ve tweaked the zones. I’ve built all the cool special things. Now what? Pocket City 2 offers a lot of answers to now what, and that’s made it a pretty good place to hang out this week.