Atlantis Fantasy: Help Poseidon restore the lost city on Facebook

If you want to take over a city, building it from the ground up to a bustling metropolis, you have plenty of options to do so on Facebook. From CityVille to My Country, most of these games take place above ground, with large skyscrapers reaching high into the clouds. But what if you wanted to build a city underwater (with all of the differences that would provide)? Well, you can now do just that. With a little help from Poseidon, you'll be able to restore perhaps the most famous "underwater" city - Atlantis - in Kobojo's Atlantis Fantasy.

The game plays as a fairly standard city-builder, except that it takes place underwater. Your citizens are mermaids (and mermen), and you'll grow underwater crops like Sea Cucumbers or Aquatic Tomatoes to earn extra money for town. The entire city revolves around a statue erected in your honor, so every business or home must be connected in some way by stone roads. Homes will provide offerings every few minutes or hours, and each home also offers a certain number of workers to your town's production buildings.

Most buildings require items like Coral, Iron or Stone to build, so you'll be able to place item-specific factories in your city that can produce varying amounts of these items over time. Depending on how many of your limited number of workers you'd like to dedicate to a particular task, you can create 1, 4, or 6 pieces of Iron at a time (as one example) in just 30 minutes. To be especially clear, the amount of time the production takes doesn't change, but the amount of items you'll earn in the end does, depending on how many workers you had assigned to the project.

%Gallery-146493%

While collecting these profits takes energy (as does clearing out the underwater debris, harvesting crops and completing most other in-game tasks), this energy can also be used to speed up the production on all major buildings. This counts for businesses as well, so if you happen to come across an in-game quest that asks you to collect from your underwater movie theater five times, you won't have to wait 40 minutes for the movie to finish playing on its own; instead, you can spend four energy to speed it up manually, with each energy spent taking off 10 minutes that you'll have to wait. It's unfortunate that more games don't employ this feature, as I'm sure players would be much more likely to take on the more difficult tasks some Facebook games have to offer if they knew they could skip the waiting game by just throwing around some extra energy.

Either way, the game is rounded out with the ability to collect map pieces and expand into new underwater areas, and social features that ask you to collect building materials from friends, allow you to send free gifts to your neighbors, and even visit friends' towns to complete tasks while you're there. All told, the gameplay here isn't that revolutionary in the city-building space, but the charming and unique graphics are definitely enough to add a particular draw to the gameplay. Where else will you be able to line your streets with jellyfish and lantern fish instead of street lights?

Atlantis Fantasy currently sits at 280,000 monthly active players. To join them, head over to the Atlantis Fantasy page on Facebook.

Play Atlantis Fantasy on Facebook --->

Have you tried Atlantis Fantasy? What do you think of this underwater take on the city-building genre on Facebook? Is the game unique enough to draw you in, or are the basic gameplay elements too similar to its competitors? Sound off in the comments.