The Mobile Gamer

Pocket city 2 is a city building game for android and ios with several interesting features that make it different from most other games in this genre.

You customize your mayor (player) and build your first city, then you can move to buildimg next. There are difficulties to choose and in case you don’t want to progress normally by leveling up and want to build everything at once, there is a sandbox mode just for you. You can also invite a friend and build together.

The reason why you have to customize your player character is a special feature of this game, which is that you can go and explore the city you built, on foot, by car, motorcycle or plane, helicopter or with a glider. Pocket city 2 is probably the only city builder game that lets you do this. There are also several minigames to keep the free roam interesting, like demolition with a bulldozer, finding lost kids, racing, etc. There are also random events like injured citizens or holdups. To make you feel even more like a part of the city the game lets you buy stuff from every shop in your city or buy any house there, decorate it to your liking and even make a house party.

The game costs about 5€ on google play and has NO microtransactions.

PROS

• free roam around your city
• no ads or microtransactions
• lots of minigames
• you can start events like parades, farmer market, etc. but also disasters
• 2 players can build together
• you can share cities for other people to download
• can be played on both landscape and portrait

CONS

• big cities are a bit too demanding for weak phones, expect slowdown and maybe lag
• you can build with a friend but can’t roam around the city together

Alternatives for this game can be other city builders like it’s predecessor pocket city, which also has no micro transactions and is cheaper, but you can’t walk around your city as it’s a 2d pixelated game. Another I can think of is theotown, it’s free but it has microtransactions.