iLook at Pixel People

Pixel People is as casual as they go in term of iOS games, you have two resources, one of them can be paid for with real money and is used to save you the most time, the other grows slowly over time. The visual style is pretty neat and there one some very interesting game mechanics in there that made me bite the bullet and play tons of it, ultimately tho, it fails a bit short of what I wanted from it.

Surprise! This is actually my Sim City review

There are three great ideas behind Pixel People
First of all, you can 'beat' PP, there is an endgame, and the goal of the game is to obtain all jobs by cloning previous jobs you've got together. You start with a few options (Mayor for instance) and when you clone mayor with itself, it might give you another job such as secretary, when you clone mayor and secretary, you get another job, secretary + secretary might give you one too. Whenever you create a new job, either you get a new building type or you send that character to work in one of your buildings you already have, netting you more money per second.

Lots of little jokes in the jobs and the character's names. Hey is that Mario as the plumber?

Of course, you don't have an infinite amount of people to assign jobs you, they take about 15 minutes to spawn (you can speed that up by spending utopium) if you have enough houses, which take space, space being the most limiting factor in this game.

Now you know if all of your buildings are working at the same time.

The second great idea is that buildings can do things, things simple like telling you how much money you're earning per second to letting you pay a 1.99$ IAP to get double duration for your buildings, from telling you another clone mix you haven't figured out to letting you build roads and parks, it's interesting to see these new little features pop here and there when you place another building in your city.

Buildings produce money for fixed periods of time, by taping on them you restart that timer, this upgrades the timers to last twice as long.

The third thing is the fact that you can get utopium without paying money at a... let's say reasonable rate. You can plan trees that randomly give coins or utopium (but you have a 25u per day limit, no matter how many trees you have), you get utopium everyday from a mine, you get some from achievements, from looking at the credits and from random gifts your citizens give you when you fill hearts (more on that later), so it's possible to unlock utopium-related buildings and upgrades by never spending any money, which is fine.

However...
For all the thing this game does well, there are a few problems that make me less excited to boot up the game even now.

First and foremost, the building novelty wears off pretty quickly, your first few buildings have features attached to them and that's exciting, but then large chunks of what you're building is only used to make money and the feeling of joy you get from being able to build something new isn't there anymore. These buildings are boring, they take space and all they do is make money. I know it would've been a bit difficult to find a new use for all buildings but I'm sure it would be doable. And then I'd be happy to have new buildings to place.

Most of the buildings are like that, bland.

Additionally, there's not much to do in the game. After a while of not playing, you start up the game and have to tap on all your buildings so they start making money again, then... Well, if you have trees, you can wait for those to be ready to harvest - why isn't there a building for auto-harvesting trees? - but mostly, you're going to fill hearts. I love how there's a building that reduces the number of hearts you need to fill to get a surprise and another building that allows you to pay 2.000.000 coins to get a surprise instantly. The process of getting these hearts is boring, you wait until there's a heart above one of your houses, you tap on that house then hold a button until a heart is filled. When you have 11 hearts, you get a surprise that can be a random animal, utopium or money.

Hold the love

Finally, things get out of hand way too fast. You need to buy more space using your coins but the costs increase in the tens of millions pretty fast, then you need to let the game run forever before you can upgrade your city size. And size is everything in Pixel People, you can't place new houses if you don't have space - houses can hold from 2 to 6 people and if you want houses that take less space, they cost utopium to build - you can't clone new jobs that require you to place buildings, you can't plan trees nor decorations.

The decorations themselves are cool because they raise 'Spirit' for your town which gives you discounts on building time and expansion costs, still they are insanely pricey and I'm at almost 40% discount. Building more decorations would take up more space and I'm not sure I would win time that way. Casual games are time sinks, I know, but I wish this one would've been a little more.

More land, more money, more problems indeed, Pixel People