I built this city (with only a little rock and roll)
Are you tired of living in a city filled with Starbucks, fast food restaurants and chain stores? Megapolis is here to help. It's a pure city-building game with some rather fancy choices of architecture (Eiffel Tower, anyone?) and plenty of tasks and quests to complete.
I need more megabucks!
The concept of Megapolis is to build a profitable city, as well as taking part in special projects such as building a bus service or building infrastructure such as road junctions. You immediately start earning coins and gaining residents. Unlike other city-building sims, you don't need to upgrade buildings.You'll find yourself addicted as you keep coming back to get more money and see how your Megapolis is progressing.
After the first few rounds, you don't get much opportunity to earn the all-important "megabucks". In Megapolis, there are some things that you can only do with megabucks. For example, they can be spent expanding your land.
This is where the dreaded (and necessary) in-app purchases come in.
While there aren't any adverts, it's still a shame that you can only get to a certain point and then have to either abandon the game or pay up.
While you can connect to Facebook to play with your friends (and complete offers to get more megabucks), you can also add people from Megapolis, meaning you won't bug people on social media with constant updates and requests.
Ups and downs
After a short tutorial that takes you through the basics, you're left to build your city. Overall, gameplay in Megapolis is straightforward. You can browse through commercial and residential buildings in their respective menus and chose a space to build which you can can then filter according to your budget. Unfortunately, when you've built your city up some of the smaller buildings get lost so you it's tricky to tap on them to get more residents or coins.
It's a little slow to load and sometimes moving buildings from place to place can be a headache. Also, when you expand your land, you have to manually move each building to the edge of the plot. The same goes for collecting coins and welcoming new residents. You can earn points that automize this process, but when you've been playing for a while and you've got a big city with different zones, it becomes tiring to have to click on each individual symbol every time you open the game.
Travel the world without leaving your home
While initially your city will seem unspectacular with wooden houses and low-rise buildings, it's not long before you're able to build loads of cool buildings that look fantastic on screen. London's Gherkin building, the Eiffel Tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the Empire State Building - imagine all of these landmarks brought to life in colorful 3D; it looks awesome.
The music and sound effects are nothing special, so you will probably end up muting them both.
Back to city-building basics
Megapolis is a fantastic city-building game that will get you hooked quickly, especially if you're a fan of the genre. It seems like a natural successor to Sim City (without the pollution and natural disasters), as it sticks to the traditional format. If you could earn megabucks more easily and with a few usability improvements, Megapolis would score top marks.
