Last updated on November 30th, 2025 at 08:31 am
City Island 5: Building Sim – Simulation Game Review
City Island 5: Building Sim is a Simulation/Entertainment/Family game from Sparkling Society Games B.V., first launched in 16th December 2018.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 9,959+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes City Island 5: Building Sim Stand Out
Build a city, your city
“City Island 5 – Tycoon Building”, a new city builder game from Sparkling Society, will make you the mayor of a small town starting on just one island. Send your airship to explore the world and unlock beautiful new islands to build your new cities on. In most city-building games, you are just managing one city, but in “City Island 5 – Offline Tycoon Building” you will be expanding your horizon and skylines to new islands, each with a different theme and surface to build a city on. This city game is also playable as an offline game, so you can build your city without internet or when you have no wifi connection. Join millions of players with the most popular casual city-building game series on mobile!
From a town, to a city, to a metropolis
Your town will start small as a village, but your cities will grow larger by placing more buildings and unlocking new islands. Building games in the City Island sim games series are well known for their very rewarding free-to-play offline games, packed with quests and loads of content, with always something to do. Visit the towns and cities of your neighbours or visit my city.
City building with a goal, with a purpose
These simulation city builder games fall into the category: fun, casual, offline city building games for free. So this means that you’ll never get bored playing “City Island 5 – Offline Tycoon Building”! Next to the hundreds of buildings to unlock, this island city builder game has dozens of quests to earn treasure chests packed with very cool stuff. Design and build your island city the way you want, and play with friends to help each other. These casual tycoon simulation games come with a lot of cool buildings and islands to unlock and will definitely make you stick around for long sessions to collect loads of money to make your town and cities grow and design them however you want to build a city.
“City Island 5 – Offline Tycoon Building Sim Game” City Builder Games Features:
- Collect, upgrade, decorate, and explore in this complete construction simulation game!
- Collect rewards and earn treasure chests!
- Play this game offline or online. No internet connection required to play
- City builder games made fun again with dozens of cool islands to build your city on!
- Build your city and watch other players’ cities as well!
- Don’t forget to rate us or give us feedback!
Terms of Use: https://www.sparklingsociety.net/terms-of-service/
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, City Island 5: Building Sim is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 16th November 2025
Recent improvements include:
Bug fixes and performance improvements
Download & Availability
City Island 5: Building Sim is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get City Island 5: Building Sim on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game is amazing Ive been hooked.
Love this edit feature called Road to award.
Game gets stagnate quick. Too many limitations if youre not willing to spend your $$$$.
We really enjoy creating cities so it is fun to just sit and work with all the different buildings that were created for this game.
We love the app but it pressure you to purchase these coins to make it easy to upgrade. Trying make it more addictive by having more islands around.
We had played this game when we were little and we LOVED but then we had to delete it but still we LOVEEEEE IIIIT! We will just recommend that in the first island theres a part in the mountains but none of the little persons there walk by so its kinda sad but still we LOVE THIS GAME.
We really love this game since we first played it five years ago, but as played too much we realized some things are missing in options like : we would like to collect all money from all buildings in one click not separated and also choose buildings to upgrade at the same time that will be cool.
This is a great game for right now. Only problem is there are fantastic homes; buildings etc that cost gold coins which we if ok, but the prices very high, can you bring down gold prices or up then grab bucks purchasing the special items.
Our fav game so far. But we want to rotate the buildings 4 ways instead of just 2. Pls develop the game like this.
Great fun but would be nice if it wasnt so hard to get rewards.
Honestly one of the better simulated building games. Im really not interested but Ive been playing for about 4 days straight which is longer than most game apps last on our phone so, Good job.
Can you please add so you give other people your city so our pop can give us his city.
Question what is the point of saying do you want a tutorial or do you not and the player says no thank you so what happens three seconds later youre forced to do stuff a property with the gems you do not have. So basically youre lying to your players youre saying oh you can take the tutorial away, but were still going to force you to do it. You guys are so deceitful its not even funny either forces to do the tutorial and dont give us that option to take it away or whatever but dont tell us that we can take it away and then you still do it. Thats deceitful thats thats no good.. Dont do that to your players.
We love this game and so do our kids.
This game takes time to build and earn rewards. The buildings and islands are expensive to buy when you move up Level 10 & higher. Using strategy to plan which commercial buildings pay more, and houses that can be expanded with the right number of occupants to make your population happy, and your city balanced. We do not pay for coins or keys, we prefer to collect them.
This game is so fun and it barely has Iny ads.
Wonderful game to play, but it would be better if the players could rotate the island as they are building their cities. Maybe that feature could be in a future update of the game.
We are disabled so we love building the cities and going slow we dont have much else to do. It is fascinating to build up cities and watch how communities build up. Makes we wish we were younger and could work to build a city for real. Laffs. Anyway it is fun to us. Thank you :).
Looks like we did put our foot in our mouth in a review we sent roughly a week ago about the pink key count (diamond keys) not being visible and the potential for this being a way to take resources away from player with out them knowing. You can see your diamond keys in the treasure chest purchase area (not ideal, but it is there), so no player scamming with that idea. Tried to delete our review, but couldnt find it. Dont think its there, but maybe it didnt post immediately. Our only complaint is the ads pop up when exiting menus or just simply touching the screen.
This game is good, good graphics and lots to do, keep us busy. However we dont enjoy all this ads popping up, as we play, cant stop it have to wait till it ends and some ads are long. We know this game is free and these ads probably pay to show, but its ridiculous how many ads pop up, we downloaded this game before and had to delete it cause of all the ads. Thanks.
They dont make it easy to get the coins without buying them with real money. Other than that so far we dont have any other complaints.
We always read how apps try to say that have no control over the content of third party advertisers who they share aka sell your information to. We attempted to opt out of all of the third party companies and not only were some of the links broken, but some links lead to a page saying that you CAN opt out, but there is no link or they want you to provide your device ID or email. Just overly complicated and they DO have a responsibility to make sure that their partners are legit.
We love playing city building games.
After initial 10 levels where buildings are cheaper and level bonuses high enough. After that game slows down to snail pace which is impossible to overcome except to pay real money.
This is perfect for adults and children. Not too hard either, but very enjoyable! Love how happy it is. You always have the option to watch short ads if you want double points. Some of the ads are great and have led us to more games.
Id give it 5 stars if the game packs you can purchase werent so expensive!!! 44.99 for a chest.
We really do not want to spend money and yet there are items that we need pick unable to get unless we purchase gold bars. Why does buy lots cost 300,000,000.00 its a game we would enjoy playing Can there be less items that require so many gold bars and realistic lot purchases . We would have rated a 5 star.
We love the additional island challenge that allows you to get all of the buildings for free but simply save your money to invest your property/ Land to build more properties to get closer to your surprise! We do wish they could change the land style of the challenge instead of it always being the same layout but its still amazing to play.
It's fun, but some houses are too expensive! Gold coins also have no way to earn, only to decrease and not increase.
Great game our only complaint is after a while the only way to get stuff is through coins and theyre really hard to get if you dont buy them.
We absolutely love this game. We have been playing this game over 5 years and will always play it. Its exciting when more islands are added.
Do not play this game. If you do not have patience, you really really really need patience for this game or a lot of money. We personally love the game and Im trying to acquire the patience needed to play without spending the money. Enjoy.
Everybody wants a game where THEY are in control, and that they control what goes where. Well maybe not EVERYBODY, but many people do! This is the game you have been looking for. It is fun! There are rewards you can earn! And different islands you can make a town out of! As a middle schooler, to anyone who is younger, or older than us, we think this is a great game. Our only issue is that items like residential buildings get more expensive as the game goes on and citizens want there houses upgraded, and you have to spend a lot of money at points. So if anything we would keep it not as pricey. But something good and fun is you can be a cop for a minute! Let us explain. So when you get into the game more and more, theres this icon that shows up and you press it and try to catch like five criminals in some number of seconds and if you succeed at the challenge, you get a price like silver keys or tokens! Finally, our opinion is that we think this is a great game for ALL ages.
As in all the games in this group, at first you get a few houses for cash , same for other buildings , then wam. Nor you have to use gold or buy game cash with real cash. When you start there are two or three houses. A few businesses and community items. You can increase the number of buildings. Some of the games tell you what you need to buy with building, road, path or waterway . That is dumb.
We have been playing this game on and off for more than 5 years. It starts out well and we find ourselves engaged as a way to unwind in the evenings. But, we always hit a point where it becomes redundant and as the game progresses the times to completion become too long that we lose interest. We just recently re-installed the game (Summer 2023) and was again enjoying playing, but this time the number of ads that pop-up arbitrarily overwhelmed the game and detracted from the experience. We just deleted the game from our iPad. The number of ads were over the top.
We spent 100s on this game and Im going to have to stop. They keep deleting our purchases- if we spend our coins on products and land why do they disappear? We logged in and it wasnt saved but its been there for over a day. They make it hard to get coins anyways, youll have to buy because things will only be gold coin prices and you have only green cash. Its annoying.
After 2 1/2 years, no real money spent, absolute minimum of stupid video ads watched, level 138, soon as we get 100,000 gold coins and $300,000,000,000 (very close to both) Im outa here. Fk your giant pop-up ads.
Fun game but not much can be done without having to spend money on coins, keys etc etc etc. We deleted after getting suckered into spending too much money on virtually nothing – pun intended.
Theres a really good game for small Youtubers with this app. We can make content in different languages so more people can watch our videos. Its a really good app. We think you should download it . Quality separated south from all the other garbage mobile games. This is a really good game you should get.
We gave it a 1 star because Sparkling Society has got to get their act together! They just sent us a free code today through their email to members who have signed up for their newsletter and it does not work and is an old code that was previously sent to people. Add to the fact they have a promotion this week where you can win a skyscraper or so it seems but some people are receiving a ferris wheel instead! They promised awhile back to add more features into the game moving their levels up to 250 but have yet to add anything in the months since they disclosed the leveling up! The game freezes, the videos freeze, and we have had to delete the game entirely once because it had completly frozen for over a day! Glad we didnt put our own money into the game! A few years ago it was a great game 5 out of 5 but now they spend more time it seems by their other games like zoo life etc Maybe they are spending their time on city island 6???? Hopefully they are.
This will keep both you and your family busy. Uses a lot of creativity to create your own island.
We like the fact that you can strategize ways to build your city without necessarily having to spend $. But like they say, time is money so if you dont spend money, itll take you longer to build thing. And It helps keep your brain sharp because you have to think about how to make the pieces fit the way you want them or how will you use the limited # of workers you have to build your city quicker. 1 strategy we use is converting $ to keys/coins at night that way most of the things are finished or at least have way finished by the time Im ready to play the game against. Another is buying lots of banks/desert resorts because they have the highest payout/conversion rates. And buying the residential building that give us the most people per coin.
No Connections Between Multi-tiered islands and some have connecting strips that work? Why is that? Additionally, those connecting strips have only two rows. Three would be better, or just leave the one for the roadway. Also, isnt it time somebody allowed 360 rotation on buildings and objects, or even a diagonal position? Just asking. We also wonder about the scrolling through the buildings, rather than being able to group them or search by category. Everything else is just everyone has said, par for the course with games.
We love this game kept us busy for hours.
Love the game. Planning on trying 6 too. Videos are buggy. 8/10 times when you should be able to click the video to watch an ad to make an exchange instant, the video isnt working. Same with wheel spin videos. Double your win by watching the ad but the video doesnt work.
Love the graphics. Love the variety of buildings.
Super addicting not to hard to get off of tho. Very interesting always something to work for.
This game is 10 times better than city island 4 there are so many buildings and islands in this game. Honestly lost for words. Best choice ever.
Nico problema muchas cosas necesitan ser compradas con dinero real y siento que le quita un poco la emocin.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.3.1
- Size: 329.62 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: AR, DA, NL, EN, FR, DE, ID, IT, JA, KO, MS, NB, FA, PL, PT, RU, ZH, ES, SV, TH, TR, VI
- Content Advisory: Loot Boxes
- Developer: Sparkling Society Games B.V.
Last updated: 16th November 2025 | Genre: Simulation, Entertainment | Developer: Sparkling Society Games B.V.