Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

EA wades into the same, tired model we've all come to expect from free-to-play games. Create a game that could be fun, then layer an arbitrary time delay mechanism that slows progress to a crawl unless you spend real money. TA-DA! Now we have a game that's pointless to play unless you derive pleasure from tapping mobile device screens once or twice every five minutes...or you're a desperately uninteresting person prone to bouts of boredom. The game allows you to build multiple factories which produce steel and/or wood (early game), but it only allows you to build ONE Building Supplies Store. This is the building that makes those oh-so-precious nails you need to build/upgrade many buildings. It can take as little as 60 secs to make a load of steel, but it takes five minutes to make one batch of nails. ONE. Seriously. Buildings take multiple batches of nails to upgrade. The money economy is dependent on your being able to build/upgrade buildings, rather than the usual taxes/maintenance balancing act that we're accustomed to in a SimCity game. I can only assume the already plodding pace of this game will only get worse when the money dries up. More advanced buildings cost more money, so it WILL dry up. Other NPC city entities will offer to buy your excess raw material from time to time, but they don't pay much. The only reason this game doesn't get a one-star rating is its only saving grace. It runs very well on my Kindle HDX and the graphics and animations are excellent. Day and nighttime effects are well done. Everything has the style and graphical behavior we've come to expect from a "Sim" game. This game is desperately trying to break out of the shackles EA has buried it under for obvious monetary reasons. There's so much potential here. Charge a price for the app upfront, get rid of the ridiculous delay mechanisms, and let us build! Until then, Cities: Skylines has taken your sim crown by word and by deed. This app is definitely not going to win it back.