I got a chance to play a near-complete version of it today; it looks great. Fans of the series will recognize the SimCity 3000 look and feel, but the addition of touch screen controls makes sense for things like zoning (creating a certain type of building zone). Using the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone to do things like zooming in and out of your city also makes the game a good fit for the device.

EA has already made two SimCity versions for Nintendo’s portable system, the Nintendo DS, but even though I have that device as well, I’m quickly finding the iPhone is becoming my go-top mobile gaming device. Part of it is because I always have the device on me, but it’s also that the iPhone is powerful, as you can tell from the fact that it can run this relatively advanced version of SimCity.

Once you’ve made your village into the metropolis of the title, a free-play mode is unlocked, allowing you to carry on building without any defined objectives. To an extent, this mode reveals quite how important the tight, objective-based structure is in the game.

After a while you may well find yourself tiring of simply optimising your city, but by then you’ll have had enough hours of fun to have lost the right to complain. It’s a symptom of the cut-down strategy that’s employed here - the relatively uncomplicated relationships between happiness, crime and pollution make the city appear more obviously algorithmic, and hence less organic, than the original game whose blueprint Metropolis uses.

PRO

• Good controls and menus
• A lot of variation in visuals and gameplay
• Challenge and Free mode offer a long challenge and large playing ground

CON

• Needs possibility to save more cities
• Veterans may want to dig a little deeper

You’ve got a limited space to work with, and you need to balance out the city stats in order to complete each level’s objectives. Yes, although you’re working towards building one city, the game is still spread out into level-based chunks. In fact, most of the game dynamics are similar to last year’s SimCity Societies. In each game segment, you have certain objectives to achieve. You’ll need to get your population or one of the city stats up to a certain level, and you’re only given a set number of months in which to achieve this. You’ll generally have to make a new building or two, unlocked by completing the other objectives.

However, what Metropolis has over its socialist cousin is an excellent execution of the structure that made the original SimCity so compelling. Not only is the game split into levels, but there are also three separate islands that represent the residential, industrial and commercial ‘districts’ of the city. You’ll still get the chance to put down some grim-looking grey slabs in the residential district, just as you’ll need to build housing on the industrial island, but each has its own building set and general flavour. The residential zone has a pleasant green tileset, working its way down to a sludgy brown colour in the industrial sector.

Would I play this game for more than an hour? Yes.

Why? It’s been an extremely slow start, but the game is getting gradually more complex. I have faith that the game will eventually mimic my beloved SimCity 2000, only now it’s portable with a cool touch-screen interface!

Specifically, EA Mobile has released the first mobile-exclusive version of the famous city-planning franchise: SimCity Metropolis. It takes a lot of the good stuff from its predecessor SimCity Societies, and adds more depth, as producer Olivier Proulx tells us.

“SimCity Societies was really a casual game when you think about it,” he says. “It was less about building a big city, and more about your management style and decisions, and the moral behind those decisions. With the new game, we wanted to get back to building a big city while keeping the casual gameplay that we think worked pretty well in Societies.”

The game sees your city evolve from a small town to a bustling metropolis (hence the name), and involves working through 18 scenarios, linked by an overarching storyline. You also get to play in three different districts of the city: Downtown, Industrial and Residential.

You’ll love</p>

• Losing hours in your own world
• Putting a park next to a prison
• Calling your town Dong City

You’ll hate

• Having to deal with pollution
• Constant “help”
• Stylus not half as exact as mouse

If you’ve never played a SimCity game before and have a capable computer, you’re better off tracking down an older version. You’ll get most of the features, all of the depth, and none of the control issues of SimCity Creator. If the Wii is all you’ve got, you’ll still find a serviceable SimCity game in Creator, but you’ll just have to dig a little deeper to find it.

If you’re looking for a game to waste lots of time with, you could do worse. SimCity Creator comes with a variety of modes, including a core “Free Mode” that retains the series’ most addictive qualities. Free Mode puts the player on a blank topographical canvas with the task of building roads, zoning areas, running electrical lines, installing plumbing, and doing all the other seemingly mundane tasks that make SimCity so compelling. Before long, players have to make decisions about tax valuations, community programs, overcrowding issues, pollution problems, electrical shortages, crime, and a host of other challenges. It’s the sort of game that will have you looking at the clock hours later, wondering where the time went.