If you like simcity-like urban management games, give My Country a spin.

If you’re a die hard simcity fan, you may or may not like it. Although it’s a simcity-like urban management game on the surface, it’s a whole different animal under the skin.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first…

This game is pretty straight forward, just keep building and collecting money so you can continue building more stuff. There’s no hard choices you have to make. Nothing you do will lock you out from building something else or negatively impact your city in any way. A challenge is what’s really lacking in this game.

The other big problem with My Country is the constant nagging to buy in game money and items using real money. I understand developers release free games and want/need to fund their efforts. Unfortunately, pay-to-win has become the norm. But I would be much happier if I could pay a set fee to stop seeing the nagging questions all together. Even if you do buy items with your real money, you’ll still continue to get prompted to buy more when you run out, which should happen pretty quickly seeing how easy it is to click the orange money button by accident.

The name of the game itself. My Country? It’s kind of odd. I’m not sure this was the best choice from a developer’s point of view. Try googling My Country and see what you find.

So what’s so great about this game?

Different types of buildings require you to hire different people in order to run the building. This is good because hiring people requires a set of items that randomly drop from building new improvements or upgrading existing ones. The challenge lies in figuring out what items you need to hire a CEO, landscaper, cab driver, or whatever it is you need to run that new building.

As the size of the map grows when you unlock new zones, you may find yourself toying with new and creative layouts for your city. Once I grew my land area a few times, I stopped worrying about packing in as many high dollar buildings as I could on cookie-cutter street layouts and started designing intricate gardens and twisty paths.

The varying and numerous types of improvements you can build is a breath of fresh air from other city management games. The graphics are good and there’s plenty of detail for each building and city dweller if you want to zoom in and take a look.

So it’s got its ups and downs, but in the end I haven’t seen anything better than this game (of this genre) in the market for any phone platform.

And finally, here’s a few tips for those of you starting out…

Start by building things that start contracts, and keep the contracts going after they complete. (look for the blue dollar signs) Don’t spend all your money before restarting all available contracts because the regular buildings that spawn money by themselves don’t give you squat.

Before you accidentally burn through all your special money, you might want to buy some buildings that can only be bought by using the paid-for orange money that you get starting out (and per level). Or buy the items that just don’t seem to spawn. Inevitably you’ll have several building sitting around just waiting for you to hire someone that you can’t get. You can skip all the building/bulldozing/rebuilding cycles you might find yourself going through to get that missing plunger in order to hire a building manager for example.

Once a timer is up and a building spits out some money, click it once to break it into money and xp, but don’t waste your time collecting the money, xp, or random item. It automatically gets collected after a few moments. This will save you time and headaches later when you have a hundred buildings waiting for you to collect.

If you build regular buildings that don’t have contracts and you’re only building them to spawn an item, don’t bother upgrading them if you don’t need the items that spawn from upgrades. It will take so long to recoup the money that it’s just not worth it. An exception to this is for special improvements that you know you’ll be keeping around for a long time.

Posted on August 18th, by admica in games, review.

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