Casino City Review

These days, if you told anyone in the real Sin City that you planned on building a casino, they’d laugh in your face and try to book you for open mic at the local comedy club. Times are hard in the so-called entertainment capital of the world, and unfinished casino projects embarrassingly line the Strip like so many broken slot machines. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Casino City, an addicting business sim that brings back the recent glory days when Las Vegas’ streets were all but paved with the green stuff.

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Facebook users strike a jackpot with Casino City

These days, if you told anyone in the real Sin City that you planned on building a casino, they’d laugh in your face and try to book you for open mic at the local comedy club. Times are hard in the so-called entertainment capital of the world, and unfinished casino projects embarrassingly line the Strip like so many broken slot machines. Fortunately, that’s not the case with Casino City, an addicting business sim that brings back the recent glory days when Las Vegas’ streets were all but paved with the green stuff.

Enter Victoria. A sassy businesswoman with a true love of the game, Victoria starts you off with three slot machines and an ATM, complete with a decently sized and decorated opening area. She then gives you a stash of chips (the game’s main currency) to use to add more machines or decorate your casino. Extra machines and gaming tables bring in more money to expand your casino, and periodically you’ll have to empty each machine for extra chips. These machines never need to be taken offline for upgrades: If you buy a better machine and no longer like the look of that jungle-themed video poker device, you can just sell it and place the better machine in its slot.

Casino City
Casino City knows its inspiration well, and much like real casinos that first snare their players with decadently luxurious surroundings, you can decorate your casino to boost its rating. This rating in turn affects how many visitors you receive and how quickly your machines fill up with cash. In addition, by buying visitors a drink or rescuing lost tigers or penguins that inexplicably saunter in (someone really needs to tell Siegfried and Roy to tighten their cages), you can improve your visitors’ happiness, which in turn prompts them to spend money even faster. Sadly, visitors to your casino will waste no time in throwing their trash everywhere, but if you keep your casino clean, you’ll win chips and you’ll keep your visitors happy. And just to make sure no one steps out of line, you can even hire sunglass-sporting bouncers for a starting price of 50,000 chips.

Casino City

Social interaction is heavily integrated into Casino City, although you’re free to drop by Victoria’s casino if you don’t have any friends who play the game. By making your friends VIPs, however, you can exponentially increase your casino’s income, and you’ll be able to receive enviable additions (such as arcade games) that are only available as gifts. Visiting a friend’s casino also allows you to play casino games yourself—such as blackjack, video poker, and slots. You’ll get 500 chips for each visit, and you can win up to 2,500 for your own casino or, naturally, you can lose it all.

Casino City

Casino City inevitably invites comparison to My Casino, which we reviewed back in May. The differences between the two are few, but for now the chips seem to have fallen in Casino City’s favor. For one, Casino City simply looks better. Coupled with a swingin’ jazz soundtrack and endlessly customizable and well-designed options, Casino City’s high-level casinos would look very much at home on the Strip. Secondly, Casino City focuses on playtime, so there’s none of the long waits for upgrades that were so common in My Casino. Like its counterpart, however, Casino City occasionally runs very slowly (particularly when there are a lot of visitors on your floor), but on the whole it offers a much more enjoyable experience. The only true downside is that an inordinate amount of the game’s most eye-catching items require real-world cash, but there’s more than enough other attractions here to ensure that Casino City will hold your attention for a very long time.

The good

    The bad

      80 out of 100