Featured: Android Game Review – Big Business
App Name
Big Business from Game Insight
Description
Big Business might be a city builder game, but it’s like no city builder that you have ever played. Big Business sets itself apart by incorporating infrastructure and commerce to make your city much more engaging and realistic.
From the start of the of the tutorial phase it becomes pretty clear that you won’t be spending much time sitting back watching your city work, you have to make it work. You grow crops like cane, flax and berries on your farms. You buy trucks to get your crops from your farms to your confectionery or paper mill and finished products from your plants to your warehouses where you turn your finished goods into cash.
You’ll build houses to increase your population and provide the workforce that you need to increase your industrial and farming capacity. You’ll build coffee shops, parks and other recreation areas to improve the quality of life for the citizens of your city and you’ll build up your ecology as a sort of carbon offset to the factories and plants that you need to build to make money.
In short, it’s a very realistic set of requirements for any city, real or make-believe.
How it works
Your new city begins with just the basics. You’ll start with enough power for your house, warehouse, confectionery, farm, garage and administration building. From there, you use your initial pile of cash to build your empire.
You’re given a few beginning tasks to get you started and enough funds to buy, build and upgrade your city. Your expansion choices include:
- Housing
- Farms
- Confectionery
- Mills and plants
- Stores and attractions
- Parks, picnic areas and green spaces
Your first concerns are to get your farming and industrial assets up and producing, then you must quickly move to improving your housing and quality of life for your population. As you improve the quality of life for your population, more people magically move in to your city, providing the human capital that you need for growth. Once your population increases and your experience level rises you can then begin to expand your city and grow your empire.
Each stage of the game requires that you manage the total growth of your city before you can expand further. Your housing, transportation, entertainment, industrial, farming and ecology assets have to grow and improve together to support your population, industry and community.
Opinion
I’ve played a number of city builder games over the years and none brought this level of game play to their offerings. I’ve had a lot of fun watching my city grow. I’ve added farms, trucks, bakeries and paper mills to my young city and my population has exploded. My territory has expanded and I’ve created my own little version of urban sprawl.
This game wasn’t made for my 7” Acer Iconia A100 Honeycomb tablet, but it plays incredibly well on it. The larger screen size has increased my enjoyment of the game. I’ve found it very easy to engage again with the game after I’ve put it down to do other things.
The experience with this game has been nothing but a positive and I’ll be keeping it.
Ratings
- Speed (5/5) – Everything that you do happens pretty much in real-time.
- Features (5/5) – Turning roads into a vital feature is brilliant.
- Theme (5/5) – Everything is very well done.
- Overall (5/5) – Solid even on my 7” Honeycomb tablet. Looks great, plays great.
Pros:
- Freemium game. You can buy credits, but I have played this game for hours and hours and haven’t run out of funds yet.
- Roads are free and vital to game play. Without transportation you are out of business.
- Very in-depth game play. Build the farm, grow the crops, produce and sell the goods.
- Wide variety of farming, industrial and residential properties can be built.
Cons:
- Very easy to overspend on ecology and entertainment options with little or no payback. Tough to recover financially if you go to far.
- Fire and ambulance helicopter appear out of nowhere when you call for them. I’d like the option to build these facilities in my city.
- In the beginning your population growth is much slower than needed for progress. It’s easy to overspend on houses and entertainment to build your population and it is tough to recover from the mistake.
Conclusion
Big Business is an engrossing city builder experience. As only a casual gamer it is very common for me to install a game, grow bored with it very quickly and uninstall it. That won’t be happening here.
Including all of the transportation and commerce requirements in Big Business is absolutely what sets this game apart from every other city builder that I have tried. You actually get the feel for what managing a community is like.
Expansion, construction, maintenance, transportation and agriculture responsibilities added to trying to juggle the happiness and entertainment of your population is an engaging experience. Even if you are only a casual gamer like I tend to be you owe it to yourself to try download this game and give it a try.
The game is free and has more than enough included credits to begin building your Big Business. Download it and try it. It’s a keeper.
Links
Market Link
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- Market Link
Category: androidheadlines.com, Applications
I feel the writer about the helicopters. Wish I could build a heliport/airport. I appreciate a free helicopter at the push of a button, though!
I’m on level 12 now and cranking things out in moderation. I’ve built a couple of farms & I’ve found the game flows smoother if I build/grow items that the quests are asking for as soon as they pop up in the quest box on the left side. I’m at the point where I’m setting the game down to let the 3 hour productions take place so I can be productive in life.
While I’m writing, here is my code for others to enter for free stuff: 0ac1fbfd26de
Enjoy!!
Warning if you might foresee having to be offline for a few days, the game goes nuts and your town will be destroyed and show absurd times to repair or grow things. I figured out my berrys will now take more than 15,000 days to grow. I feel this game was not ready to be released.
I wrote to the developers and this was their reply.
“Thank you for your request.
The problem you’ve described is already known.
Our specialists are working on the issue and will fix it as soon as possible in our future updates.
Please, stay tuned and follow our updates at Android Market.
Your Support team,”
Was really enjoying this game, but it appears to have a big flaw. I’m on level 18 and have upgraded my admin building to the limit. I cannot build any more entertainment buildings. Without increasing my population I can’t buy new farms, ranches, factories, etc.
It seems strange you can’t upgrade entertainment facilities as they say upgrade level 1 – and also the collections indicate that we should be able to execute contracts and upgrade them as that is the only way to get certain items for those collections.
Contacted Insight, they say developers are working on it so fingers crossed there’s a fix soon. In the meantime I am demolishing buildings that only allow less population (e.g. 600) and replacing them with ones that allow more (e.g. 1000+), which sucks given how much money was needed in the first place to acquire these and add the costs of the entertainment facility to replace them. Very slow and costly process – especially when I need to get to 40,000 population to be able to build another farm or factory.
Now can you turn sand into grass or figure out how to build on sands?
Garf,
Garf,
You can turn sand into grass, or vise versa. At the bottom of the screen, there are 7 buttons in a row, 3 large and 4 small. Skip the 3 large ones, and the first small one should have a road, traffic cone, and colored squares on it. Click this. Nowclickt the yellow square to build sand, blue to build water, and green to build grass. Note, however, that this procedure will cost City Credits, depending on how much land you change.
Big Business how to restart the game to start playing?
I’m on level 14 in this app and have found that the game is very fickle. It is easy to grow up your money to around 100,000 coins, only to spend it all immediately. Also, I’m can’t understand how to build a fish farm. It says it needs to be on water, but I have plenty of water space open and it’s still red. Otherwise, the game seems to flow smoothly and progress well.