The Burbs takes the now incredibly familiar city-building aspects found in other Facebook games (Social City, CityVille, etc.) and does nothing to add any originality to the formula. Specifically, the game is so similar to Social City that I'm surprised Playdom hasn't spoken out in protest.
As the year 2010 ends, 3-D city-building games continue to grow into a big trend on Facebook. Exhibit A, of course, is CityVille (and it's 20 million inhabitants). As for Exhibit B, let me present to you RamaCity, an upcoming 3D social game by Bigpoint.
City building sims are something of a fad right now, but few games follow the form to its logical conclusions so completely as Game Insight's Big Business. Want to sell that milk? You'll need a special truck for that. Want to open some new production facilities? You'll need to see if your power plant can handle it. Here is a game that focuses on both production and refinement and, to a lesser extent, on the importance of city planning. True to its name, Big Business illustrates the interconnectivity of businesses throughout a city and the hard lesson that you must spend money to make money. Oh, and it's fun, too.
CityVille is Zynga's long-awaited entry in the city-building genre, which has proven itself amazingly durable on Facebook. Where many city-builders must be played strictly in brief bursts, CityVille actually offers enough to do that you can spend a considerably longer amount of time with it per session. In theory you can only do things until you run out of energy, but I found myself needing to wait for things to happen more often than I found myself waiting for my energy to regenerate.
As a kid, I'll always remember the first time I encountered New York City. Driving in the back seat of the family car up Interstate 95, I recall staring at the Manhattan skyscrapers in awe as they rose over the horizon into the skyline. Yesterday afternoon, Zynga gave me a sneak peak of its upcoming game, CityVille. It wasn't the exact same feeling as staring at Manhattan for the first time, but it sure comes close.