Last updated on January 31st, 2026 at 11:11 am
City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding Sim – Simulation Game Review
City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding Sim is a Simulation/Entertainment/Strategy game from Sparkling Society Games B.V., first launched in 18th September 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 124+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding Sim Stand Out
If you liked the early Sim City games, you will definitely love this 'sim city style' game!
In City Island you will build houses for your citizens, decorations and community buildings to make them happy, and create jobs so you can earn money from your happy citizens.
Build a business empire with a choice of 85+ unique buildings, like hotels, cinema's, offices, bakeries, restaurants, and even oil platforms.
Catch some fish with your boats, make people happy by building parks, schools, churches, libraries, museums, and even a nice ferris wheel.
It is all about balance in this city game: happy people attract more citizens, who will need residences and jobs.
Features
- FREE game
- HIGH QUALITY graphics
- Intuitive gameplay
- 85 Unique buildings (residential, commercial, community, decoration)
- Attract citizens with parks, trees, and community buildings
- Build residences for your citizens
- Collect profit from your commercial buildings
- Upgrade your buildings
- Collect XP and level up to unlock new buildings
- Collect dozens of REWARDS while playing
- Expand your city to create more room for constructing more buildings, and making your city bigger and bigger
- Speed up construction/upgrade time
- Help your citizens
- Find pirate chests around your island, containing cash or gold
- Enter friend codes and gift codes to receive cash and gold
- The "City Advisor" will tell you what is needed in your city
Follow us on Twitter, and Like us on Facebook, to get FREE giftcodes every week for the coolest city building game!!
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding Sim is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 30th November 2016
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
- Now 200 levels instead of 150!
- Fixes for Facebook
Download & Availability
City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding Sim is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get City Island – Building Tycoon – Citybuilding 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:
Our favorite city game! We keep coming back to this one. Classic.
This game is great! If you get the right buildings, you can very easily earn money. Also, the soundtrack is amazing.
This game is fun, and mostly accessible. It could use some more work to get it to be even more accessible. It also needs to be updated.
This is really actually fun we love tycoons and sims games that are similar to this game. Whoever is the creator of the game, we want him/her to reply to us cause they are awesome! Thanks for making the game creator.
We love this game its so addicting.
Ive just started yesterday and Im still learning the game, so its incredibly frustrating when we cant understand something because Voiceover wont read all the information. Love the idea of the game, and the fact that it is even slightly accessible, but improving the accessibility would make us love it even more. In turn, we would be happy to give this app five stars. We just want to be able to enjoy it as much as everyone else.
We would like to play this game. But we cannot play with out full voice over support. Thank you.
This game is fun but the others when we played it it didn't work because our thing is not good that much but finally we got this.
Oh our Fricking God, City Island 1, it Takes Forever Like 7000 Years to Make City Island Building Tycoon Infinite Money Untill 9025 AD, Please Make a New Update Now.
Its probably okay because cant add sidewalk ,canal and railway and no ads and many more and you start with 100,000 cash.
Like the game, takes forever to earn money. Facebook log in doesnt work. Please update and fix.
We are maxed out on land…when will you make the island bigger or create more islands to branch out to? We love this game but cannot do anything more because There is no more land for us to buy.
Simple easy game. Its relaxing but in the end its really not very rewarding. It takes a lot of time to earn a gold bar or 2 and about half of the items available In the game for the town/city can only be got with gold. The game does not allow you to use the dollars you have earned to trade for gold so unless youre willing to shell out quite a few bucks in the App Store for gold, youll be playing the game a lot of hours.
It's a really nice game, we like it. The only problem is that it ,sometimes, doesn't give you the rewards you get when you complete something.
We have been playing this game for a long time. And our happy level is above 100% and our jobs are full and we have people needing jobs but yet our stores are still red dollars and there employees are full but yet it doesn't give us full income so confused by this.
This game would be a very good game if there was so many items based off of gold. Like after you buy a certain amount of something it makes it where you cant buy it because it turns from getting it with cash to getting it with gold, it gets quite annoying. If they could fix this problem the game would be so much better.
We dont know if this is happening to anyone else because all we see are good reviews but ads pop up every few minutes. It comes up randomly while Im trying to lay down roads or buy buildings and itll force us to sit through 30sec ads and then auto send us to the App Store. We cant figure out a way to turn it off but its a nuisance. And before people rip us for complaining about the ads, Im not about to spend real money on a game Im just trying out to see if we like. The game itself isnt bad but what a turn off. If the rest of the City Sim are like this, we probably wont keep this on our phone for very long.
Been playing the game for couple of months now watched a video for gold when ad was finished our screen is black we can see all our icons in game but cannot see our city any ideas how to fix it.
Free gold is not working when you try to watch a video.
We love this game, but we give it a one star because we were on level 37 and out of no where, when we went back to play we had to restar again, our city was deleted, so dissapointed.
If you are looking at the reviews before you download this…This game is boring AF.
This game is so much better then sim city so much fun.
We love this game but the screen goes black for no reason. The commercials appear ok. How do we fix this? Thank you.
We play a lot of these games and get really good at it in just a couple of days like getting to Lvl 20 in 3 days but the thing is everything cost so much and you get so little profit so it's like they are forcing you to buy it butt what we do like is that 200% sale we got 8 million dollars for 4.99 and not a lot of games do that. It would be awesome if there was a mode that allows you to collect profit while you are not playing the game because ports for example set sail catch a fish and come back in every like 15 seconds,why right??? The cars need to know where they are going it will be awesome if cars let's say they turn into each other that should be a wreck what if you create an insurance building and fix the game to when some one crashes it shows a sign and thAn money gets sent to the insurance that will be awesome Keep up the good work sparkling society your games rock.
Only ONE gold bar for watching a video aka RUNNING AN AD. No. We say at least 20. Bye.
You should be able to rotate the building all the way around.
We have always dreampt of being able to play a city building/management game. This one is not totally inaccessible but still needs work to be useable for those using voice over. With that said, please make it work for us because from what we were able to get out of it,, it is an awesome game.
We really do enjoy playing but would love to play more than 5 minutes with out having to watch an Ad. Have spent at least $10 on upgrades. Doesn't help. So if you like to get stopped every 5 minutes while playing, this is the game for you.
This game won't even download!!! We've had this game on our iPad for like six months!!!! AND it won't let us delete it! IF we WERE YOU! We WOUND NOT GET THIS GAME.
This app is inaccessible to voice over users. When we get to the animal farm we can't do nothing. If this app is made fully accessible we will change our rating.
OK so us we like this game a lot and we feel like it needs a little more stuff to make it seem more like a city like it would be like more hoodies stuff like we want to be able to make a hood part of the city because we are trying to like plan out how we want to make our town we're thinking like where you come in we are thinking of making that where you like the country part and then like a little ways and you'll get into the city and then in a little corner there will be like a hood area.
Can't Get our accout we logout because we have 2 accout but when we login in something IS WRONG!!!! We STILL HAVE THE SAME ACCOUT THAT we LOGOUT!!!!!!!!! PlayerName:+CityMaster+ can't get it back.
This game is ok, but the number of ads are insane. Don't waste your time.
This game is a time waster. Which makes it AMAZING. We definitely recommend this.
As of one week ago, the app will not work. Thinking you might be working on the site, we've waited. Today, it continues not to boot up. Time has to come to do the repairs or drop the game. Have enjoyed playing, but not having the game working is the pits! Please.
Fun game, but constant ads popping up make the game nearly unusable.
Do you hate popup ads? We think it's the bane of the Internet, just like how you keep popping up ads while we're playing, with out asking us first! Uninstalled after the 3rd pop up in 10 minutes.
This game is absolutely amazing 10/10. No crashes no bugs and the ads don't pop up every 10 seconds. We suggest this game if you're into building games.
It is very fun, and gets better the far the you get into it because you unlock better things. One of the best free city builder games.
Its very fun to play and its time consuming. We also like how it is offline-playable as well. Things can take huge amounts of time build and upgrade, but its no fun if you finish it in a single day.
The game is fun! There is a little problem with our game it hardly lets us on.somtimes we get on well we try it crashes every 2 seked.
This is a really good game! It should get noticed. Friend us though. We-inrbfsppv78o.
Losing interest in game! It takes too many XP points to reach the next level. Should be less points as you level up.
We play a lot of simulation building games such as MyTown, megapolis, ect. And this one is by far our favorite. Its easy to earn money, earn gold, buy buildings, and upgrade buildings. You can speed-up upgrading buildings by cash OR gold for a cheap price. Also, there's not too many ads. A couple things we would like to see in future updates is being able to pick up all of the buildings and decorations at the same time so its easier to remodel our city and to be able to upgrade buildings past level 5.
We don't always get our rewards for completing objectives and anytime a random ad shows up it makes black blocks cover certain areas on the screen such as the fence borders or the cash to collect profit. We have to close the app and reopen after a few minutes to fix that. Almost making it not worth playing for us but we love city simulators too much to stop.
After the update it will no longer open . It loads and we push the play button and it goes black and crashes . Besides that it's a good pass time.
Don't waste your time and space on this ridiculously boring game. You do nothing but start the construction of houses or businesses and wait for your next hourly money reward. It's a waste.
Ads pop up every three minutes, making it difficult to play. Ads even show up while the loading screen is still up, and it turns the app upside down. Sometimes the ad makes the screen black, forcing you to restart the app to continue to play. Rewards for watching videos do not appear. We get that this is a free game, but having large, intrusive ads that don't go away takes away from the gameplay. Cute at first, but the ads make it annoying to get far in the game.
Very basic game and not much graphics. Not interesting at all. DO NOT PURCHASE ANY IN APP CREDITS.
We like this game so much that we have reached the maximum level and still playing. We need more room and more levels!! We have four games going. City Island and City Island WE on iPad and the same on our iPhone. When are you going to make the other games, we.e. Airport for the iPad? Our game is not opening.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.5.2
- Size: 83.16 MB
- iOS: 7.1 or later
- Languages: AR, DA, NL, EN, FR, DE, ID, IT, JA, KO, MS, NB, FA, PL, PT, RU, ZH, ES, SV, TH, ZH, TR, VI
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Sparkling Society Games B.V.
Last updated: 30th November 2016 | Genre: Simulation, Entertainment | Developer: Sparkling Society Games B.V.