Overview: Social City looks like a city simulator a la SimCity, but it’s really not – it’s really just a dollhouse where you can lay out cute buildings with adorable animations in the most aesthetically pleasing manner. If you go into it with that in mind, however, it’s an excellent example of its kind.

You start off with a relatively small plot of land with a few modest homes, a couple of factories, and a lovely park. You direct the factories to produce some kind of widget to bring in money – each contract takes a different amount of time to complete, so you can choose between checking in more often to collect small amounts of cash, or waiting longer periods of time to get large lump sums. Like most of these games, you’ll make the most with the shortest check-in interval, but there are many options, offering a large amount of flexibility.

Add housing to increase your population and entertainment to keep that population happy. Like the factories, the houses are on timers – every so often people will “move in” and you’ll need to click on them to actually get credit for the population increase. Unlike factories, however, the people will wait endlessly for your attention. Because a single house will produce more population endlessly, you don’t need to build a ton of them if you don’t feel like it.

And that’s the real beauty of this game. If you want to build a city that contains nothing but a single log cabin surrounded by wooded parks, you can certainly do so – although you will need a factory to keep the money coming in. Roads have no actual function, so you can lay out your blocks as you see fit. The only real downside is that buildings are not rotatable, so you’re limited in how you can space them if you want to see the detail.

The detail is well worth seeing – from the cottage with a tiny kid practicing archery in the yard to the hamburger joint with a tubby customer out front enjoying a meal, every building is a minuscule story. It’s worth placing one of every building to see the little people interacting with it. The gift items are all limited-time, encouraging you to swap them with friends so as not to miss out.

Expanding your city plot is a real-money-or-friends deal – after the first expansion, you either need a certain number of neighbors or you’ll need to spend City Bucks to get more room. You do get City Bucks through normal gameplay, but if you want any of the buildings that require City Bucks, you’ll need more than just leveling up will give you. It is purely a personal call, though – you can definitely enjoy the game to its fullest without placing every single building.

If you come to Social City looking for a complex simulator, you’ll be terribly disappointed. If you just want to build a lovely place to live populated by adorable tiny people, you’re in luck!