Pocket City is a charming, streamlined mobile game that captures the essence of full-fledged city builders like Cities: Skylines or SimCity. It's a near-perfect adaptation of the concept for phones, with incredible art, great characters, and an endless series of quests that will help guide your city from a tiny hamlet to a booming metropolis. Pocket City is a microtransaction free mobile game that's available as both a free demo and a paid product. It's an homage to old school city builders like SimCity and more modern offerings like Cities: Skylines. In Pocket City, you control the development of a town as an all-powerful city planner. This means that you build roads, designate sections of land for industrial, residential, and commercial use, and build utilities like water and power. You also can place unique structures and city amenities, including parks, fire departments, police stations, hospitals, and more. In many ways, Pocket City feels superior to older city builder games on PC and consoles. It's an incredibly polished game with great controls, a bright, cheerful cartooney artstyle, and a clever cast of NPCs that help guide you on your journey to build a city. The touch controls are intuitive and simple, and the gameplay of making strategic decisions and zoning off areas of land never feels rushed, making the experience relaxing and enjoyable. A the start of Pocket City, you'll have a town hall and not much else. As the mayor, your job is to oversee the construction of roads, buildings, and zones to allow people to move in and be happy. Your first task will probably involve laying down a bit of road to connect the town hall to plenty of empty space. Next, you'll allocate some land for residential zones, commercial zones, and industrial zones. Houses and apartments will spring to life in residential zones, giving citizens places to live, while commercial zones will sprout stores, malls, and entertainment centers. Industrial zones provide places to work and help give your city the economic backbone it needs to succeed. As the mayor, you earn money based on how many commercial zones you build. In order to spend money in commercial zones, your town's residents need both places to live and jobs to work at. This means that there's a careful balancing act between the three types of zones in the game. A helpful menu shows you how you're doing in terms of balance, giving you an indication of which types of zones your city would most benefit from and allowing you to construct more of the right stuff. As you play through the game, your advisor Anna and her cast of colorful friends will give you periodic quests. These quests naturally will guide new players along the process of creating a booming city. They'll give you little rewards for doing things that will help keep your city growing smoothly, like upgrading power plants, creating more houses for new residents, buying new land, and making bigger roads. You can ignore these quests if you'd like, but they're usually for sensible things that you want to do anyway, so it's a good idea to check in on them from time to time. Overall, Pocket City is a near-perfect mobile game for city building fans. It's not quite as deep or complex as games like Cities: Skylines, but it's still wonderfully rich and incredibly charming. Given the lack of ads and microtransactions, it's absolutely worth spending some time on.