Much anticipated game from Zynga seems to be very addictive in first

sight but loses it charm. I would keep this review short, because usually people don’t write reviews about Social Games. This is sort of review of Zynga and their games.

Zynga seems to be one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley these days, with venture capital from Google and great reviews from everywhere, it seemed like Zynga had found the secret sauce of making money in “social”.

Ctyville seems like the mix of the games Zynga brought last year. It is a cross between Farmville, FrontierVille and Playdom’s Social City. Actually, it would be better if I say, Zynga copied the idea of Social City and added aspects of FrontierVille and Farmville into it. This is nothing new for Zynga, they get the idea from some other company’s game and incorporate it with a lot of social feature. But this time they missed the trick – they could not expand on the idea on ‘we build the city’. And then what, this is the problem, a city would be build in couple of hours and player would have nothing more to do. Seems like the game was hurried and creativity was missing.

This game is too social. Zynga games always had the element where people need the help of neighbors, and if one does not have enough friends playing the game they can buy virtual currency with real currency. Here at every step one has to either ask help from neighbors or has to buy currency. They had over done it and it irritates the players too much. That makes the games bottom line as either spend real money or wait, there is not fun aspect to it, or something that can keep player interested.

Games seems like a lot of waste of time for accomplishing nothing, as compared to Farmville. I would like Zynga to use that secret ‘book of social gaming’ that is talked about and how Zynga has cracked the code. If they continue to roll out games like these, I don’t see the future of social gaming getting anywhere. May be times have changed and we like to Jump the Doodle or use Anger of Birds to kill the pigs.