StarCity

StarCity (with KPOP Star) is a new social game, a recreational business simulator wrapped under the theme of South Korean Pop stars. In it, players act as an upstart agency that is going to run his/her own Star City and entertainment business. Starting from planning the first performance, you will contract more pop stars, send them to perform in different stages, reduce stars’ stress level by shopping and dining, build strings of facilities to attract visitors, and commercialize the entire city to make a successful business.

City-building plays the biggest role in gameplay, with gathering hottest stars into your agency ranking the second. Besides the options of Expansion, Energy and Coin, the shop is almost purely fulfilled by facilities categorized in six types – Housing, Business, Industry, Event Center, Deco and Street. As the architect NPC offers the construction quests non-stop, you just follow the guidance and build various structures, which eventually make a chain of business and accommodate more visitors.

Another important element is to contract hot stars and plan for their shows in different event centers from the basic Street Live to tiered stages and finally the Center Big. In the agency, you will find stars in the fields of Music, Drama and Sport (the last one not available yet in current beta). Fans of the Korean stars will find a wide range of familiar faces like Lee Hong Gi, Lee Minho, SUZY and teams like Wonder Girls, 2PM and Bigbang, etc.. Don’t expect to see them lively perform in shows, for they are at best represented by real posters while some are embodied in cartoon drawing. You gain your first two contracts pretty easily, but later have to collect special collection of items to contract more stars in your agency. And most of the items are from putting your contracted stars to work.

Put on Facebook, it’s practically very suitable to be there. It’s set up with some Facebook-characteristic designs, which include the Energy bar, bright palette, animated game world, flying icons of coin, star and energy over the screen, role of premium currency in skipping quests, earlier access to items and hiring NPCs to fill the otherwise empty slots of friends, and so on.

Social elements are certainly embedded. Specific quests asks you to invite friends; completion of many facilities requires friends to staff in it; extra rewards are sent if you invite more friends to be audience of the show; and special are rewarded when you visit friends’ and help out there. Where friends should play their roles, premium currency or real money can act as the substitute. To view it from another angel, you are taxed if you don’t have friends.

StarCity isn’t particularly interesting or outstanding. Game developers certainly targets the great number of Korean pop star fans, yet the gameplay, generic in nature, will soon fall flat. Without any real interaction with own favorite stars, how many star fans will stay hooked to the game? Without anything special of its own, how many game fans will come back to it?

StarCity Screenshots: