Just when we thought the appearance of city-building titles on Facebook were beginning to slow down, Digital Chocolate released a new application by the name of Millionaire City. However, while this, in and of itself, is nothing unusual, the release actually marks the second city-building game for the company in less than three months. The first had been the isometric NanoTowns, back in March.
At first glance, one might think Digital Chocolate is remaking the same game, but actually the two titles are very different. Yes, both involve the creation of your own bustling and aesthetically appealing metropolis, but the method to that madness is completely different.
Millionaire City is actually centered around the concept of buying, selling, and renting land, businesses, houses, hotels, and so on. It’s actually more business and real estate oriented as opposed to its predecessor where primary income stemmed from producing goods from various businesses to complete quests for citizens that were seemingly too lazy to walk down the street and buy their own darn stapler and coffee.
Essentially, players must purchase plots of land before they can purchase any buildings to construct. Expectantly, the larger the building, the larger the cost, and the more empty land required. Once requirements are met, players must then construct free roads to connect the new structure to the rest of the city and over X amount of time (which is longer for larger buildings, but can be constructed instantly for a price), the new investment will build.
This is where business elements begin to come into play. For each home, you will sign contracts for its tenants that vary in length based on your level and range from three minutes to a day or more. Each contract costs $X to make, but pays out a good chunk of profit so long as you remember to log back on and collect. Of course, all of this is relatively basic.
What makes things more interesting is the concept of what Millionaire City dubs “influence.” This is a blue box that expands beyond both commerce buildings and decorations. Any home that is even partially within these influenced sections will cost a percentage more rent. Furthermore, all commerce buildings will periodically produce money from whatever it sells, with extra income stemming from whatever homes are within range. Though it is not entirely clear, it also appears that homes that have overlapping influences (i.e. from having multiple decorations nearby as well) will also pay out extra cash that is 2% more for each piece of décor nearby.
In addition to decorum and commerce buildings, users may also construct buildings called “Wonders.” Unfortunately, there are only three to build at the moment, but having one grants bonuses to every single home in your city, regardless of its distance from the Wonder. However, these take days, if not weeks, to fully build, and the only way to finish faster is to post to your Facebook feed, and ask your friends to help out.
As one might surmise, other social features include visiting your friends’ cities and helping them out by “upgrading” a few of their structures. Sadly, this is nothing more than clicking on a few of them and making them sparkle for a bit, but it does earn a little extra experience and cash. Moreover, the social elements are further enhanced, slightly, by a standard leaderboard system of all Facebook friends that are playing, with its ranking determined by the overall fiscal value of your town.
As far as other miscellaneous features go, Millionaire City also incorporates a fairly basic quest system to help guide the user on what they should do next. It’s a nice extra, and completing them earns some nice chunks of in-game money as well as the virtual currency Gold, but most are along the lines of “build two decorations,” which unlocks “build X more decorations,” and so on. These don’t really act as guides so much as “hey, I accidentally did something; let’s cash in.”
Visually, this game looks pretty good too, but it’s perspective is almost completely top down, and is a style that hasn’t been seen regularly in quite a long time. Even for old school gamers, it feels a bit dated and even nostalgic. It’s not really a bad thing, just a surprising choice, and with a more realistic style, it is a stark change from the more cartoonish and stylized NanoTowns.
Regardless, Millionaire City does bring a little more depth to the prospect of city planning in the fact that to make your virtual space the most efficient, you actually do have to plan. Granted, it’s no SimCity, but it is nice to build things for more than the sake of building them. It’s an excellent point in case towards the slowly evolving complexity and sophistication of social games. If there was any one disappointment, it’s that the virtual currency is used for nothing as of this time (or at least nothing we’ve observed yet – we assume it is either coming soon or will be used for the instant build feature in higher level structures). It’s equally surprising that Digital Chocolate’s NanoVerse has yet to be involved, but that may be something planned for a future update as well.
Source: Inside Social Games
Wednesday, May 19, 2010