Today saw Electronic Arts release Sim City for the iPhone on the App Store, and I didn’t even realize it ! Praise the lord for RSS feeds. So, what do you get for your £5.99 ($9.99) ? Is it worth the outlay ? Well yes, yes it is !

Let me start by saying I loved Sim City on the PC. I could easily spend hours sat tweaking my city, building links to other cities and recovering from alien attacks. I love Sim City.

So having said that, it’s not really any surprise that I like the iPhone version. That’s not to say the game doesn’t have its faults, it does, but for an iPhone game it really is neat.

Sim what?

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, you may not know what Sim City is. Put simply, it’s a game where you build your own city and then control its growth by setting rates of tax and generally building a city your Sims (citizens) will want to live in. It might not sound fun, but it is. The original launched back in 1989 and has sold a fair few copies in its various iterations since. The whole thing is the reason for the umpteen different ‘The Sims….’ games, which I suppose is the only down side to the franchise !

OK, so how does it translate to the iPhone?

Surprisingly well actually.

One of the things that concerned me while waiting for the game to download and install (all 30-odd MB of it) was how well the interface would shrink to the iPhone’s screen. There are so many options and menus in the desktop versions that I was worried EA would either have to cut too many things out, or just make the whole thing too ‘busy’. Thankfully, neither of those things has really happened.

What they did was put the basic building and zoning options down the left hand side of the screen, and the settings controls along the bottom. Tapping something on the left will open another column of options to the right, and again until you reach the desired option. It works well, and the icons are pretty self explanatory. If you do struggle though, there’s a handy tutorial you can follow too.

Zooming is handled with double tapping and pinching in typical iPhone style, and works fairly well. The animation can get a little jerky and scratchy at times, but it’s certainly no deal breaker. Sound too, is very Sim City-like, with the usual Jazzy music and relaxing sounds. It’s actually quite nice to just listen to, and I don’t like jazz !

One cool feature is something I just discovered by complete accident. I was playing Sim City to get the screen shots for this post when my Girlfriend called me. Obviously the game quit in order to take the call. Upon firing the game up afterwards, it automatically loaded my city, exactly as it was before. No lost game time here ! Very neat indeed.

So should I buy it?

Well, yes. If you like Sim City, I’d be surprised if you didn’t like this. It’s the first full game I’ve enjoyed on the platform. Games like Tap ‘n’ Slide are great for five minutes here and there, but Sim City is much more of a sit down and play kind of experience. It’s just perfect for train journeys and the like.

Before I finish I must mention the crashing. Now I’ve not had any problems like this, but I have read of people having the app crash at the title screen, but that seems to be an individual iPhone problem as similar reports can be found for pretty much any app out there.

So have you bought Sim City yet? Are you enjoying it or perhaps being bitten by the crashing bug? Let me know in the comments at the bottom of the page.

iTunes App Store link to Sim City