I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for the “hurry up and wait games” on iOS. Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes (both by NimbleBit) sucked me in for a couple dozen hours each time. I’m not so impatient that I feel the overwhelming need to buy premium currency in these types of games, and they usually have something to do while you wait (such as Tiny Tower’s elevator).
Just recently my girlfriend turned me on to Pixel People, a game released earlier this year by Lambda Mu and Chillingo, the latter of which you may recognize as the publisher of Angry Birds. Pixel People sees you as the mayor of a floating space city that expands by splicing clones of a different profession together to create a new one (for example the first splice you do is of the mayor and the mechanic clone, which gives you the engineer profession). Every time you splice together a new profession, you get the opportunity to make a new building. Different clones can be combined together, and overall there are about 306 jobs to discover. You assign the clones a job and sometimes the buildings will have a special effect for your city.
Managing your city also becomes very important in the later stages because each building costs land, so you have to make a choice whether you want more trees to give you coins (tress also produce up to 25U, the premium currency, each day) more decorations to reduce production time, more houses for your clones or more places for your clones to work. While buying land at the outset is very cheap, you’ll find that later buildings require more plots and land purchases will run into the tens of millions of coins range. Pixel People does have a premium currency, as I mentioned, but it’s much more reasonable with it then games of this genre have been in the past. You can get enough of it for free to get by, although it does get more difficult to resist later on.
I just started my Pixel Poeple town a few days ago and I already can’t put it down. I love seeing my town expand and nothing is more satisfying than trying to splice two clones together and seeing the pink test-tube come up (meaning I can create a new profession with the fusion).
If you own an iDevice, give this game a try (unless you abosultely hate these kinds of games). It’s charming, complex and requires a lot of forethought and planning.
App Store – Pixel People
I tried this when it first came out and it held my interest for a week or so. Then I just gave up. Tiny Tower broke me of this. I didn’t even do Tiny Death Star for very long. I am cured. I AM FREE