Moneyland for Android

1/5

Moneyland is a free idle city building game for Android. The premise is simple: Collect money and give the go-ahead for massive expansions to buildings and, on a larger scale, your city. The only catch is that this isn’t an active city manager like other Android titles; all you need to do is run around and collect money. 

If you prefer a more active type of city-building experience where you act as the mayor, try SimCity BuildIt. If you like the drag & drop mechanic, Shopping Mall 3D is a brilliant alternative.

An actively idle game

Moneyland differs from the quintessential idle Android game in that you still have to take small actions. In a truly idle game, you sit back and watch your screen while a seemingly automatic process of investment and income works away in the background, requiring you to only press a few buttons every now and then. 

In Moneyland, you drag your finger across the screen in order to prompt your character to collect money when and where it appears. You’ll then do some more dragging, directing your character where to invest the money and which expansions to make. 

Ads

‘Ads’ has become a bit of a four-letter word when it comes to mobile gaming. No matter the size of the game or how easy it would be for a relative novice to replicate within dedicated app-building software, developers choose to employ way too many ads at all too frequent intervals to try and bolster earnings from their ‘free’ applications. While it isn’t a sin to try and make money off of your intellectual property, it does fall into an ethical grey area when ads seem to take up more time than the actual game. 

Drag & drop city builder

This is a game mechanic that has become more frequently used in the months preceding this review. In the most basic sense, the drag & drop aspect of the game means that your little character merely moves from place to place with a store of money on its back. The pile grows when the character stops at pick-up points where money appears and dwindles when ‘invested’ at one of the drop-off points that trigger various expansions when the right amount of money is deposited. In this way, Moneyland is incredibly entertaining and easy to play. 

Moneyland will have you entertained and staving off boredom as you move around your city, picking up and dropping off fat wads of cash. If you don’t mind incessant ads while you play, this is a decent low-effort strategy game to try out.