How many “city building" tap games have you played before? The answer is usually “just one and I hate them" or “five on a daily basis," with very little room in between. Yes, Century City (Free) is another one of those “wait and tap" builders, but it sets itself apart with a few extra mechanics that allow you to play a more active role in your cities’ quest for unfettered expansion.
The bright and charming bit-style visuals are the first thing the developer did right, immediately evoking memories of those wonderful magazine “seek and find" spreads, or more recently, the intro to HBO’s Silicon Valley. Vehicles are roaming freely about the metropolis, boats are out and about in the ocean, and the city feels sufficiently full of life.
So what’s the core goal? Make money, so you can spend money, to make more money, to spend more money. You’ve heard it before, I’m sure. You’ll spend a lot of time tapping new building plots, which allow you to earn more gold, and waiting for them to refill — this is inevitable. But if you’re so inclined, you can head down into the gold mine to play a Cookie Clicker-esque minigame to earn more on your own pace while said buildings make you residual cash.
It’s just as simple as tapping, but several concepts help fuel that dastardly reward loop that influences children to spend $1000 on Smurf Berries and grown men to open up their wallets for another giant skyscraper. As you tap you’ll build a super meter, which can be unleashed to automatically earn you a ton of gold in a short amount of time. It’s such a stupid little thing, but it’ll have you actually paying attention to the screen instead of mindlessly tapping away. There’s also a little present power-up that pops up every so often to net you free gold, as well as a slot machine that can earn you more bonuses while you’re mining.
Oh, and above ground on the world map, helicopters constantly fly by and give you gold presents after a quick tap. Pine Entertainment really knows how to put shiny things in front of your face. Thankfully, it’s kind of fun, and keeps you engaged even in the early game. It is slow-going to a degree, but it’s something to do other than passively waiting and being pestered by alerts 50 times a day.
Of course, this is just another city builder at its core, with a few extra snags. Quests, which net you the biggest bonuses, aren’t very descriptive. For instance, there’s one that requires you to get a “perfect" tap on a present minigame, but it doesn’t tell what you “perfect" actually means. There’s four different colors on the spectrum, and the one that seems the most obvious, which nets you the biggest bonus, isn’t it. On top of that, there’s some translation issues which would normally be fine, if it didn’t get in the way of understanding the game.
For a free game the IAP is rather fair, and the ability to watch an ad to double a bonus (or subsequently, ignore a negative effect) is fairly inoffensive. Since you can actively play the gold mine bit you don’t really need to buy anything, but there will be diminishing returns of course the more you build your empire. And that’s really the rub — it has the same wait-walls that are inherent to the genre, and thus, it’s tough to recommend if you aren’t already a proprietor of multiple fake worlds where you rule over your citizen’s every move.
