I’ve lamented before that there’s a lack of real-deal city-building simulation games on the App Store, despite the genre being a perfect fit for a touchscreen device. In the early days there were a couple of proper paid SimCity titles but those games were far more demanding than the hardware of the time could keep up with and they didn’t receive a ton of support before eventually being retired. There’s SimCity BuildIt (Free), which sure does LOOK great, but it plays more like an idle game than a proper simulation. Sadly if you’re into city building games you’re pretty much stuck with free to play shenanigans, attacking/defending mechanics, and social features you likely don’t want. This is why I was so excited to post about Codebrew Games’ Pocket City back in September, as it’s one of the only city builders (or THE only?) designed for mobile with no sort of microtransactions of any kind. It also looks extremely robust for being the product of a tiny indie developer, as you can see in the first trailer for Pocket City that released over the weekend.

Seriously, I was pretty much frothing at the mouth over the animated .gif we posted about back in September, but this new trailer has me at critical levels of excitement for Pocket City. I LOVE the little details like the citizens biking and walking about town commenting on various aspects of your city, and the building and management interface looks really well-designed for touchscreen play. And those tornadoes! I NEED this game, people. This trailer was posted by Codebrew over on Reddit, where the response was overwhelmingly positive, and that thread has a lot of information from the developer including that he’s planning on charging $4.99 for Pocket City. There will also be a separate free version with rewarded video ads for those who want to check it out but don’t want to pay upfront. Additionally the game already has its own subreddit which is quite active, and you can also sign up for a mailing list on the game’s official website. The plan is to release Pocket City in early 2018 so you can bet we’ll be following this one like a hawk in the coming months.