Crowdstar, makers of Happy Aquarium and other multi-million MAU social games, has released the Alpha version of their newest game, Hello City. The game is a city-building game where you build businesses, have them do business, tax them and use the money to further build your city, thereby increasing population and, with the right businesses, please the population. It’s a standard take on Sim City with a series of ridiculously cute twists and has extremely high production values.
With Playfish releasing My Empire, Playdom’s Social City and now Crowdstar’s Hello City, we’ve seen the biggest players in social gaming take big bets on the city-building genre being the next big game. Playdom’s Social City is one of the fastest growing games on the platform and will certainly continue to grow based on its social and viral channels. The question is whether these games will be able to coexist, and if not, who will come out on top.
For that reason, each game is attempting to introduce features that make the game superior. Hello City’s take is that each resident within the city is a small person that seems to be consistent within the world. You get the feeling that you can name each of the little villagers like ants, and watch them live and grow within the city. There’s a little gold bonus minigame where you click on each of them and they say “Hello”, and you earn three gold. Now while it does take away from the realism a bit (unless you live in El Dorado), the implementation of this is just so cute that you kind of want to click the little people as much as you can. These kinds of fun, unexpected things are what makes social games special, as was revealed by Playdom CFO Christa Quarles as she discussed Social City.
Check the game out here.
