TGCVR – Day Four

It’s day number 4 in The Great CityVille Race, lets see how it’s going…

Casual

Hardcore

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One thing I’ve noticed, is that when playing casually (or stupidly, as I said in a previous post), CityVille isn’t really that much fun. It’s polished, cute and rewarding, but it really isn’t that groundbreaking. It really is just a decent city builder, adding a few extras socially but nothing really different with regards to standard gameplay. As a casual player, I generally felt that population was important and decided to build a lot more houses than I did in my hardcore town. In most town builders, population is one of the most important attributes. Unfortunately, in CityVille there are quite low caps to your population that require you to spam millions of friends in order to raise. I dislike doing this (it also could ruin my test!) and on my hardcore town I realized this was the case and didn’t bother.

In my hardcore town, I decided money was the best attribute, and it is. Businesses make more money, they’re more interesting (franchising is quite cool) and they directly relate to farming… making the farm goods -> sell goods interaction loop quite engaging (especially when you have to plan your crop and click timing). Could I casually play like this? Perhaps. I could focus on business casually. However, managing your goods and crops so that you don’t waste them (through time or the goods cap) yet always have enough to fill your businesses, is a challenging task. I still haven’t really mastered it at all yet. I didn’t really plan well enough, I could have been much more hardcore. I don’t think a casual experience would work with this gameplay, so casual players are stuck with population and spamming friends.

One thing I do appreciate much more, when playing casually, are the quests/goals. When I’m playing hardcore, and I’ve spammed hundreds of Shade Trees, I don’t really like it when some goal is restricting me from getting a new item because I didn’t build Blue Flowers instead. Even worse, there are quests that request me to build more Shade Trees… but I’ve filled up my whole town with them and have no where to put new ones! You’d think it would be simple for the game to check you already have them, some of the other goals do just that! When playing casually, goals give me something to do. As you can tell from the picture, I really do have a massive amount of money and free space. I don’t want to spam my friends too much, so I didn’t buy all the community buildings to raise my pop cap. I’ll add a new one tomorrow, I’ve already spammed too much today. What I’m left with, is nothing to do. At least the goals give me direction for what to build.

A bit of a rant there! See? I sacrifice so much for my readership!

Only 3 more days to go…

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Sam