Pocket Village: This iOS city builder is a simple way to spend some time

Earlier this month, we brought you a preview of Pocket Village, Wooga's first exclusively mobile title that has now launched on both iPhone and iPad for free. The Diamond Dash creator designed Pocket Village with short play sessions and truly "mobile" gamers in mind. As a result, Pocket Village is a simple city-builder (a lot simpler than most, in fact), but it's still cute and charming for someone that doesn't care about challenge.

The world of Pocket Village stars the Pocketeers, a kind of tiny villager that sets out into the dense forest to find riches. Stopping in a lovely clearing, it's up to you to help the Pocketeers increase in number, mine for gems, chop down wood, build new homes, workshops and otherwise improve this small (but expandable) plot of grass. Again, as far as city or village-builders go, this one is pretty simple. That doesn't mean the gameplay isn't effective and entertaining; it simply means that there isn't a lot to do outside of gathering materials and combining them to form new buildings.

Trees of various sizes can be chopped down for wood. The larger a tree is, the more time it takes to clear. Similarly, rocks can be mined for gemstones, with larger gemstones requiring more time to clear. Finally, berries can be picked from bushes, with larger berry bushes taking longer to remove. All three of these raw materials can be turned into other items inside Sawmills, Metalworks factories and Juice Blenders, as examples. For instance, wood can be turned into boards inside the Sawmill, while boards can be turned into cardboard inside the Cardboard Machine.

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There's little to this crafting other than gathering the required number of materials and assigning a Pocketeer to do the task, but thankfully, you can constantly work on mining new materials while a single Pocketeer is busy. The more homes you build, the more Pocketeers live in your village, and the more individual workers you'll be able to control. This makes the beginning of Pocket Village a fairly slow moving experience, which really picks up in terms of productivity as your village's population swells.

There's no quest system to give you things to do, and an experience point system simply serves as a way to lock items behind level barriers so that you can't have a massive village right from the beginning. Coins are also locked behind a trading window, as you must sell some of your raw or processed materials in bulk to earn various amounts of coins. In this way, Wooga has created depth in an experience that would otherwise be lacking in it, but the game is never so complex that it's hard to keep up.

Pocket Village is an adorable game, even if many of the Pocketeers look too similar to each other for our tastes, and the homes are decorated with jumbo-sized real-world items like toy blocks and thread spindles to help reflect how tiny these Pocketeers really are. Pocket Village still feels a bit too simple to appeal to today's mobile gamers that probably expect more, but younger gamers or those that can appreciate simplicity and charm will feel right at home here. If you're interested in helping these Pocketeers create a tiny village right in your pocket, you can now download Pocket Village on iOS for free.

Download Pocket Village on iOS >

What do you think of Pocket Village on iOS? Do you prefer your mobile games to be more simple, or more complex experiences? Sound off in the comments!