A Great City Building Experience For Casuals...

City Island Collections is a casuals dream when it comes to sim city style of play. The game lets you build the city of your dreams but with an easy-going approach. The game has a nice tutorial at the start to help you understand the basics and get your right into the fun. When you first start playing you only have access to the 1st island. Once you start to level up your account you can unlock additionally islands to build more cities on. The game features a total of 5 different islands to build on. The problem is they are all pretty much the same looking. Only the 5th island has some distinct land layout making it clearly stand out from the rest.

In order to get buildings to place on the map you need to open up packs of cards. The game will give you a few at the start but after that you will be using your in-game cash to buy more packs. This is essentially a gacha system for buildings. With different buildings having different rarities and the obvious legendary buildings helping increase your cities stats the most. The game has a very simple concept, you build houses to have people, you build businesses so the people can work and make you money, and finally you build things to increase your citizens happiness to attract new citizens.

The real bottleneck is when you find out how long the buildings take to upgrade and how long it takes to unlock new land to expand your city. The game soon becomes a waiting game with you just sitting there waiting for timers to reach zero so you can do something. It's a very relaxed and casual approach with some chill background music on loop. The cash shop is pretty much what you would expect with options to spend real life money for in-game cash to speed up your progress. Also, options to spend real life money on the premium currency gold coins. Occasionally there will be a pop-up pack when you reach certain milestones in the game as well. You can also just straight up buy packs with real life money to get legendary buildings and other special buildings for your town.

Overall, it's not a bad game by any means. A positive is the game can be played offline so no need for constant internet connections. The game just doesn't have very much depth to it. The game is more tailored to casual players who may not play video games much. The monetization is then done in a way to catch casuals off guard and get them to spend money on things they necessarily don't need to. The game ran smooth, and the graphics were pretty decent. My overall score would be a 5/10 it's about an average game more geared towards casual gamers.