Sim City meets Farmville

City Story is a free iPhone and iPad game in which you can create your dream city. You can add houses, businesses, hotels and landmarks to make your town grow, and connect with other players to visit their cities.

The game plays a lot like Sim City, although City Story uses the same model as games like Farmville and, indeed, TeamLava’s own Farm Story Android game. That’s to say, houses, businesses and objects need to be ‘bought’ using gold, experience points and cash.

City Story only gives you a finite amount of all of these, and you need to build up more by gaining experience, waiting for your businesses to earn you money – or buying extra City Story cash using your real money.

Like many games of its ilk, City Story is fun to play and highly addictive. For this reason it can be very tempting to spend your money on adding funds to your account in order to keep playing after the first hour or so when you run out of resources. The addiction factor is heightened by dreamy, colorful graphics and a tinkly soundtrack that bores its way into your brain.

The social features of City Story are great. When you visit another city you’re able to clean buildings for them, which helps you build up contacts who may in turn come and clean yours. You can leave messages on peoples’ walls and invite your Facebook friends to come and be your neighbor.

City Story can be very slow-moving if you don’t pay to boost your cash reserves, but it’s a game that Farmville and Farm Story fans will fall in love with.