Thursday, September 1, 2011

Game Review: My Country

I have always been a sucker for a good tycoon type game - these are, in my opinion, the best time wasters out there! I've been looking for a decent one for a while now - I tried out Mini Tower on the wife's iPhone, but that didn't have any challenge to it at all.

A few days ago, though, I installed My Country on my Galaxy S2. At first I thought it was pretty much the same as Mini Tower, but after playing it for a while, I saw that this little game had much more depth (even though the challenge factor is still a bit on the low side...).


You have things like population, power and the environment that needs to get looked after. For population there are various residential building that you can build, for power you can build, for example, windmill generators, and for the environment there's all kinds of trees and parks that you can build. In the meantime, you can upgrade most of the buildings, and the commercial ones you can customize how you'd like to upgrade them.




Each building produces income and experience points (and sometimes items needed to hire "professionals" with), which you must collect on a regular basis. As you gain XP, you level up, which unlocks even more building. Furthermore, your game map is not fully unlocked when you start, so you can end up with quite a big city.





As you go along and get more people and your environment values go up, your village also gets upgraded to a better status (which also unlocks even more buildings and items...).



The game also gives you certain objectives, which you can complete to get a money and XP bonus. Building commercial buildings isn't just a case of actually building them, and they're there - most of them need "professionals" that you hire that the building needs before it can start operating. Professionals can only be hired if you have collected the necessary items for each one - these items drop from the various actions you perform in the game, like collecting income, building new buildings, or upgrading existing ones.




I have only played it for a few days, but I do find myself coming back to this game every time. One thing that is a little annoying is that when collecting income and XP, you need to tap A LOT to get through everything, I can see how this is going to become a huge pain, especially when you have a gigantic city on your hands. There is, however, an option to collect all the income on the screen, but this costs some of the in-game currency, that you must buy with real money (which I haven't done yet...). You do start the game with a few bucks, which helps to get you going a bit quicker in the beginning.



But, for now, it's a very fun tycoon game, and anybody who's a fan of the genre will have lots of fun with My Country.

Best of all, it's FREE! Gotta love the dedicated developers putting in all their time and effort to produce these games!

Get it here.

Till next time!