Last updated on December 13th, 2025 at 08:24 am
Designer City: Empire Edition – Simulation Game Review
Designer City: Empire Edition is a Simulation/Strategy game from Sphere Game Studios Ltd, first launched in 15th May 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 874+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Designer City: Empire Edition Stand Out
Embark on a journey to construct a historic town that evolves into a thriving metropolis and ultimately transforms into an expansive empire spanning millennia. Immerse yourself in this free-to-play offline city-building game, devoid of wait times and restrictions!
To establish a flourishing empire in this free historical city builder, entice inhabitants by erecting houses, villas, and opulent mansions for their residence. As with any construction game, provide employment opportunities by constructing businesses and industries once they've settled in.
Erect expansive markets, libraries, educational institutions, and military structures to ensure the safety of your empire. Enhance the well-being of your citizens by introducing various amenities such as bars, restaurants, theaters, stadiums, and other entertainment facilities. Create grand sporting arenas and amphitheaters to host spectacular events. Commence with a modest Roman city and expand to include diverse civilizations, encompassing ancient Egyptian, Aztec, Byzantine, Persian, Norse, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures. Unleash your creativity in this laid-back tycoon simulation game.
Empire City, a delightful casual offline city-building game, grants you absolute autonomy to design and construct your town without the hindrance of wait times. Plan and evolve your city as you desire, shaping your ideal metropolis and bringing your remarkable empire to fruition. Enjoy the game offline or online, as no internet connection is required to play Empire City.
Ensure your residents dwell in an unpolluted environment by thoughtfully zoning your city and adorning it with waterways, trees, parks, and iconic structures from ancient civilizations. Manage power and water supplies, implement effective waste removal, and cultivate the land to produce food for your city. Contented citizens will contribute to your income, empowering you to further enhance Empire City. Revel in the freedom to construct your empire according to your vision.
Note: Designer City Empire Edition is completely free to play, with some entirely optional in-game items requiring payment, such as the purchase of game currency.
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Designer City: Empire Edition is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 19th November 2025
Recent improvements include:
Added a new city advisor screen to quickly see all the problems in your city.
New stats tab in city info screen.
Improvements to upgrading/downgrading paths and roads. Upgrade an entire road with a single tap.
Heatmap improvements.
Added a buildings log to the city advisor – see everything you've recently built and removed.
Warehouse capacity increased to 200.
Performance improvements.
Number formatting now matches your language.
We've added difficulty levels to the chess mini-game so you can play at whatever level you are.
Many fixes and improvements.
Download & Availability
Designer City: Empire Edition is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Designer City: Empire Edition 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:
So we love education and we wanted to find a game about building and history but never found one then in 2022 we found the Designer City Games and in Dec of 2025 we found this game and finally found what we were looking for.
This is a wonderful game!!! We love the constant additions of buildings! Two ideas we wish the 1×1 parks acted like roads and two we wish you could flip buildings in all four directions not on,y in two.
Fun, but if youre OCD, these changes would be helpful to not drive you nuts 1. Needs more designs for services. Each building needs fire, police, church and education to be near, but there is no match for many buildings. It looks stupid to have a Chinese buildings with Greek buildings. It doesnt make sense. 2. If you pull something out of your warehouse, auto take from the warehouse if you have more than 1 building. Its a pain to find an item, place it and then find it again for each item.
Although simple and with what most people would consider inferior graphics, this game blows Sim City build it out of the water. If you find yourself not being satisfied enough with this version,try their new version entitled Designer City: Medieval Version.
We love the game but it is missing geysers, hot springs, and volcanoes.
World wide Military based with different military branches of different countries bases military vehicles ships aircraft missile defense etc that would be so cool.
We like this game because its basically a sandbox game.
We like this game very much it is easy to play, and pretty simple too.
It kicks us out all the time every time we would try too play.
We just downloaded this game and we cant even build a house. The game only plays music. Deleting this game.
We have not encountered a problem yet so we really like this app a lot and we have read the other reviews and we think youre doing great.
The fact you got rid of the gold purchase show how great this game is! Keep it up u deserve 5 stars!!! Edit: So if u could get a chance could u please add some Ottoman/middle eastern structures.
Some buildings are disappearing shortly after building them ..just vanished suddenly..we tried to re install the game more than once and the same problem..building vanished suddenly..thanks.
We have played all four of the games: Designer City, Designer City 2, Space City and Empire City. We cant tell which is our favorite. Building is easy. You can play these games without spending real money. You can reach high levels. We have many times. We wish there was another theme city! We dont care for Merge City.
So we really like the this game. It has the two things we like, ancient history and city building. Its a fun simple game that has a lot of replay value. But it does have issues but there sorta minor. Now the first issue is that the walking animation for people is gone. Idk if its a glitch or something else. But thats a really minor issue. Now the second issue is that the game wont allow us name or rename our city. Which we feel like ruins the vibe. We hope you fix this cause we really like this game. We hope this review is helpful.
Best city sim ever! One improvement we would like to see is the ability to build a neighboring city. Just need to have a special bridge that would allow you to cross the edge. We are sure there would be lots of people willing to pay for such a bridge.
Its very relaxing and fun.Make sure to download to have amazing fun!!But something went wrong with it and we dont know why.
This is by far the best builder game we have played.Thank you and keep up the great work.
Games pretty fun but the warehouse freezes up while loading some buildings.Takes away the fun would be a 5 if not for this.
The variety of building designs is amazing- theyre so detailed and beautiful. So relaxing and so much fun to play. The scale of the city walls is awesome, it feels epic. Having a variety of European and Asian building designs is great.
Ive been looking for building games that are specifically Roman era and we finally found the best one. It doesnt take too long to build up the buildings, and we love that you can pick from multiple designs. We do wish we can do more with the military aspect(maybe for future update) Like defending territories from raids, and the guard towers are actual working buildings. It would be cool to also raise up an army to capture neighboring preset village or something like that. Anyways these are just some thoughts we had while playing the game. Cant wait for future updates so glad we found this one.
Fun game but after reaching level 100 it continues to crash and boot us out we play on a we pad with plenty of available storage space yet game shows low memory within the app itself so much time wasted to reach a point where the game is worthless.
Love this game because we love the games when you build your own city.
This game really caught us off guard. We thought it would be some boring sandbox game with almost nothing to do, but we were way wrong. Unlike most city building games where you are often forced down a linear path of unlocking buildings in a boring grind, this game allows you to buy things you have not yet unlocked with gold, which is a rare currency. Most people who read that are thinking Dang, this game looked cool, too bad its a money pit, but that is NOT the case. The developers actually avoided that route and allowed you to earn gold very easily through achievements, or, if you want, you can watch an advertisement. Personally, we have not watched any ads and still have been able to unlock the buildings we want without spending real money or watching ads. Also, the achievements actually give you a lot of gold for how easy they are to complete. This game is great, but we have a couple nitpicks: 1. There is no day/night cycle. Personally, we think the devs are really missing out on this one because we think a sprawling Roman Empire would look amazing at night time. 2. Too little landscaping options. Im specifically talking about the texture changes you can use such as turning the grass to sand and what not. We think there is not enough variety and options for this. For example maybe the devs could add some dirt so you can make dirt roads and stuff, that would be pretty cool in our opinion. Well, thats the end of our review, we hope the devs take these nitpicks into account, as these could really make the game better we think.
We love this game we have been looking for a city building game where you make a city form the past and this is perfect we hope the make more like this one.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: v1.26a
- Size: 150.64 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: NL, EN, FR, DE, ID, IT, JA, KO, PT, RU, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Sphere Game Studios Ltd
Last updated: 19th November 2025 | Genre: Simulation, Strategy | Developer: Sphere Game Studios Ltd