SimCity Social preview - Build an empire while griefing your friends

If you've never had a good reason to play a Facebook game, now may be the time to start. SimCity Social brings the addictive city-building sim to the popular platform. And if the thought of watching a city flourish due to your tender care and astute city-planning skills, then you'll want to pay attention. SimCity Social strips away the details that are required for a city to function – like underground plumbing and paying taxes – and instead allows you to focus on the best part of the game – building. Oh and collecting simoleons (the in-game currency), that's fun too. Building a mix of business, factories, and residential zones will let you collect simoleons, materials and increase your population respectively. However, you don't have to worry about having them be balanced or all hell will break loose, just build what you want to build, as the game is very much a visual experience.

Since it is a Facebook game, it'll use your friends in a variety of ways that both benefit you and potentially someone on your list. By sending gifts, visiting, and interacting with their city, you begin to build a relationship (good or bad, your choice) with your friends and earn fame, another currency that you can use to add unique buildings to your city. There's the opportunity to mess with your friends too, like having gigantic seagulls swoop in and poop all over the city, blanketing entire city intersections. Or you can help them put out a fire. Regardless of whether you decide to play nice or be completely unhelpful, SimCity's bright visuals and tried-and-true city building formula is intriguing enough for us to mentally prepare ourselves for the potential of dumping far too many hours (and potentially real life simoleons) into the game. It doesn't help that the game looks like an updated version of the original SimCity which we loved and poured hours into, so it also has the nostalgia factor going for it as well.

SimCity Social is set to launch “in a few weeks” and we're told to expect plenty of post-release content. For more details on the game and how it plays, watch the gameplay walkthrough video embedded above.