Virtual City brings into your hands the power to build buildings, put out fires, aid sick people and construct transport routes in order to transport goods and passengers to various destinations. Effectively, you become the mayor of the city; you control the cash flow and what is built, what is destroyed, how environmentally sound your operation is and how happy (or unhappy) your citizens are.

The complexity of the game comes from mastering the various trade routes that are an important part of getting cash flowing. Especially in the early stages, raw material producing industries are carefully placed on the map; sometimes they may need repairing, sometimes part of the operation is already set up for you, but eventually you’ll learn what routes vehicles can take.

Vehicles come in three types: trucks, garbage collectors and buses. They are all fairly self-explanatory but what is nice is that trucks will automatically adapt to the cargo that you assign them. The amount of vehicles that you can build depends on the garage that you have; by upgrading this you can buy more trucks, and vehicles themselves can be upgraded to hold even more cargo or passengers.

Construction is even easier; because the game is very much goal-orientated you will have space for everything the game will ask you to build, but often not much more. You can build houses, roads, industries and environmental features such as trees, each of which are separated into their own categories. Sometimes you have to bulldoze something in order to build what you need but it isn’t a problem with the all-powerful destroy tool.

Because of the goal focus, the game is very streamlined; unfortunately you can’t construct rail networks for one thing, and secondly sometimes the layout of the town allows for profitable transportation that doesn’t make sense. We had a bus traveling a total of three squares to the mall and back and it still turned over a healthy profit!

Additionally, population happiness is more dependent on whether you throw events at plazas rather than building bus routes or upgrading accomodation; indeed, throwing such an event creates a fireworks celebration that can rocket happiness from zero all the way up to 300. Again, this fits with the time management, goal based theme but it’s a bit of a shame that this wasn’t made with a little more intuition.

Without having to micromanage every fine detail, the experience is perfect for the short time that you’ll spend with the game...

The interface could use a little work; although the developers did a great job with cutting back the amount of buttons to the bare minimum necessary, the interaction can be somewhat counterintuitive. Some pop-ups remain in place (i.e. hovering over a building) rather than staying on the screen, making any job requiring panning the screen a bit of a pain; plus the game doesn’t offer any kind of zoom-out feature to allow you to see all of the map at once. Furthermore, especially when you’re for example trying to save up cash to build or upgrade a large structure, the game doesn’t offer a fast-forward button. This would have been a great addition.

Having said that though, the rest is very slick. One thing we don’t like is that when a lorry or bus reaches its destination it will disappear instead of parking; we would have preferred to have seen the vehicle throughout, like Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but otherwise the animations are great. You even get a step-by-step process of the building construction!

In all, Virtual City brings a slightly watered down transport/city management simulation game to the iPhone and that’s a great thing. Without having to micromanage every fine detail, the experience is perfect for the short time that you’ll spend with the game whilst mobile. With a proper port of Transport Tycoon absent from the App Store, simulation fans would do well to pick this one up whilst it’s still being offered for 40% off (This offer ends in a week).

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