Virtual Villagers is a real time sim for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This game goes above and beyond what other sim games on the iPhone have done so far by expanding the gameplay far beyond exiting the app. While this game doesn?t run in the background of your phone or anything, it does employ an Animal Crossing-esque time based system that lets it update your island to show time lapse.
The game is full of things to do and each game is slightly different. Whenever you start a new game, the map will be set up in a different fashion. This isn?t drastic as the map is small, but it does mix things up. There are multiple villagers for you to control and assign to four different occupations. Those occupations are Farming, Building, Research, and Breeding. Surprisingly, they don?t really sugar coat the whole breeding aspect of the game like The Sims does.
To make things more interesting and to help progress the game faster, there are five different minigames. Once you?ve dragged the character over to a sparkling area that indicates they can interact with it, you can speed up their process by tapping on the dice above their head. This will bring you into a mini-game that speeds up their percentage complete in their task.
Virtual Villagers is mildly pricey for a game at $7.99 but it offers a lot. If you revisit the game often the villagers will actually celebrate your return. You can do plenty of different things, explore the island, and even populate it with more people. The only issue is that for a game that comes across as a sim, it feels very linear in many places. If you?re looking for a sim for the iPhone, definitely check out Virtual Villagers.