Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

So I’ve been into the latest and greatest sim game – City Life for the PC. I was looking forward to playing this one because I was a huge Sim City fan as a kid. I still remember the first Sim City on my Mac II PC clone in my bedroom. Countless hours of edutainment at its finest.

All in all it’s a fairly decent sim game and is worth the money spent. Dare I compare it to Sim City – well it’s hard not to when it’s the only other simulated city competition out there. I feel they both have their pros and cons however. Where Sim City 4 suffered – City Life shined and vise versa. City Life has a fabulous, easy to use 3D navigation. You can completely zoom way out to see a satellite-like view and then right back down into 3rd-person view in a GTA-like fashioin. Rotate the screen, zoom in and out with the mouse, you name it.

I felt there was a lot of repetition in the models when you’re in first-person view. It’s like the city of clones, or something – you’d see half a dozen people looking exactly the same in your field of view. But I guess they didn’t want to spend too much time on that aspect as it clearly shines in other areas. Sim City 4′s isometric non-3D view suffered big time. Perhaps it was the only technology they could utilize at the time back in 2003. City Life also has this whole socioeconomic feature that Sim City lacked. That is you have to watch where you build communities for the have nots, elites and blue collars etc., or you’ll be looking for trouble as conflicts can arise. Sim City 4 didn’t really get into economics too much, but Sim City shined more in adjusting finances and taxes until the cows came home plus better graphics. Again, City Life lacks this feature; you can’t adjust anything financially speaking and the graphics are average, probably to compensate for the stress on video cards because the whole city is in 3D. Another feature I liked with City Life was the ease of housing and road placement; just click and drag a box and the game will do the rest, which saves a lot of time.

I’ve explored the free-mode and scenario mode for a few + days now and I’m finding myself more and more addicted throughout each play. Throw in a map editor and tons of nice land variations to play on and you’ve got a nice, new City sim game.

City Life was created the by French game developers Monte Cristo

Overall I’d give City life an 8/10. It’s a very entertaining title.