There is nothing remotely New York City-ish about “Megacity Empire New York” from Gameloft, so disregard the last half of this game’s title immediately. This is a city-building sim that presents you with a series of escalating stand-alone challenges (there’s no narrative thread to call it a “story mode”) where you’ll have to grow a population, deal with crises like fires, crime, and sanitation, develop commercial property, and educate and train a workforce. It’s a resource-juggling game, basically, and it’s great fun if you like micromanaging simulations (i.e. pretty much any game with “sim” in the title).

This is another phone game with too few pre-built scenarios that are too easy to master, and a set of game rules that are too easy to learn, which means that after you’ve played through the built-in scenarios and are dumped into sandbox mode, there’s no challenge left. I’m not sure why these sorts of games (see Ancient Empires II for another example) can’t develop some better way to introduce randomness and smarter AIs or rule sets to ensure repeated playability.

The graphics are nice, and unless your city gets really busy and crowded, there’s no obvious slowdown or playback issues (I did discover a couple of stutters in accessing menus when I was playing really crowded, well-developed cities). Your basic building blocks are residential, commercial, and office spaces, and these work in trios to grow your city into a thriving metropolis. Of course, there are a couple dozen other buildings and improvements you can add, as well as simple road-building tools, so that you have a fairly satisfying array of tools to work with over the course of a game. You can also set taxes, and isolate and review the effectiveness of various resources on your population.

It could just as easily be called Houston or Tokyo or London, it’s that irrelevant to the gameplay. It’s as if a marketing team came up with the title and a development team ignored it in order to bring in a playable game on time and on budget. Do not buy this game if you think you’re going to get a satisfying New York sim. City sim? Yes. New York City sim? Only if you know nothing about New York City, in which case any city sim should do the job for you, so we’re back to the title being irrelevant.

Navigation and game play are, for the most part, well thought out. There are a few small issues that, if they’d been addressed during development, would have made the game even easier to pick up and play—things like not being able to loop back to the top of a list after you’ve scrolled to the bottom, and a confusing system of backing out of the stats menu without jumping back directly to the play screen. Overall, though, it’s a well built game and very entertaining.

One annoying small issue: the incredibly sexist approach to characters. It reflects not just a male-centric game culture but a Japanese-centric treatment of women in games, where women are too often presented solely as perky girls who serve as both helpful sidekicks and angry “better halves” who scold the main characters like tarted-up Jiminy Crickets.