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Facebook Game Review: Tiny Town

Written by:  • Edited by: Michael Hartman
Updated May 24, 2011 • Related Guides: Facebook
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Build your own virtual city on Facebook with Tiny Town. Lay down roads, houses, businesses, municipal buildings and decorations. Fulfill the needs of your citizens to level up and unlock bigger and better buildings.

Basics
Rating Good

Tiny Town
click to enlarge
Tiny Town is one of the newest in a host of city building games on Facebook. In games such as My Town or My City Life the player spends most of their time clicking buildings to earn coins and experience which can get monotonous over time. In the game Tiny Town the clicking is removed and your buildings collect taxes periodically and place the money into your city vault. This eliminates the need to click and frees up your time to get down to building. Leveling up in Tiny Town requires you to fulfill the needs of your citizens which include housing, jobs, power, water, schooling, waste, and medical care. Each level of Tiny Town will require you to fulfill a certain amount of these needs before you can progress to the next level. You only need housing and jobs in the beginning of the game and slowly require more needs as you level such as water, power, schooling and medical.

Game Interface
Rating Good

Tiny Town
click to enlarge
Tiny Town starts you off with a giant avatar representing your mayor to oversee you town construction. This avatar doesn’t do anything and is really just an annoyance. Thankfully the game has an option to turn off the avatar which will speed up the game and let you get down to building. At the top of the screen you will find your current level, town population, and the needs of your citizens. Any need that is grayed out is not available yet due to your current level. If you click on a need it will tell you how far you need to progress to meet the required need. So for example you might need 250 more people to advance to the next level. You can also rotate your city to see different angles as well as zoom in and out of your town. The rotate feature isn’t featured in other city building games on Facebook and is a very welcome feature. At the bottom of your screen you can turn the music on and off as well as access the building, placement, expansion, and Facebook friends, menus.

 

 

Building
Rating Good

Each building you put down in Tiny Town will work towards meeting a certain need. So for example, a simple mobile home will fulfill the housing need by eight spots. As you click on buildings in the building menu they will tell you the number of needs they fulfill. You will start by putting up some simple homes and businesses to fulfill housing and jobs needs before going onto the next level. Buildings are required to be near roads so construct those before putting up your structures. Your city hall is in the middle of your screen and roads need to lead back to city hall so plan accordingly.

Homes and Jobs
Rating Average

Tiny Town features many different home styles such as mobile homes, doublewides, apartments, ranchers, and condominiums. Every time you build a new home you are fulfilling the housing requirements of your city. Businesses include the café, barber shop, general store, saloon, diner book, store, hot dog stand, gas station and so on. These buildings will help to fulfill the job requirements of your city. Jobs and housing are the two main requirements and you will need to construct a large number of these buildings for your city.

Municipal and Decorations
Rating Good

Tiny Town
click to enlarge
The municipal buildings such as the clinic, fire station, police station school, water tower, and landfill will work towards fulfilling not only jobs but other needs later on such as power, water, schooling, health and waste. Other municipal buildings can be added such as parks and gardens. You an also add a few decorative items to your landscape such as tress and fountains but the selection is limited. The game needs more decorative items but it does provide the basics.

Making Money and The Grand Opening
Rating Good

Tiny Town
click to enlarge
Your buildings in Tiny Town automatically generate money for you over time. You can transfer this money from your vault into your main account to use for new construction projects. You can expand your vault to hold more cash by building the vault building. You will need real life cash to expand the vault but you do start with a capacity of 2000 coins for the vault once the vault is full you need to transfer the money into your account so you can make additional tax revenue. As each building is completed there will be a grand opening held. If your online when your buildings complete you will receive additional coins. The grand opening will eventually expire and the bonus will disappear so try and grab them when you can.

City Repairs
Rating Below Average

While Tiny Town does have less clicking than other city building games you still need to repair buildings. Each time you log in you will find many building need repair. The repairs only cost a few coins but it can be annoying clicking on several buildings each time you log in. This is fine when your city is small but as it grows you can have dozens of repair signs pop-up each time you log in. This process could be made easier by having a repair need deduct money from your account periodically to reduce the amount of clicking involved.

Conclusion

Tiny Town has all the makings of a great sim building game. The game has a nice assortment of buildings for you to add to your growing city. The fact that you need to fullfill needs to level up makes this game seem more of a Sim City style game. If this game continues to add content and more features it has the potential to be one of the leaders in the city building genre on Facebook.

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