City of Cash Review

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

IYAGames‘ City of Cash puts you in the role of an entrepreneur building a business empire. At the start of this sim you’ve lost everything and are looking to make a comeback. You’ll start businesses, hire employees, recruit talent and battle it out in the boardroom. Ultimately, your goal is to achieve wealth, status, and to own a bunch of cool cars.

Getting Started

You begin City of Cash with your house as your only asset. Fortunately, tapping on your home provides you with seemingly limitless funds. Guided by your helper, Dulcie, you’ll start by building a cafe. Next, hire employees and recruit talent to run the business. As the game progresses, you expand the cafe, hire more employees, and level up your talent. Eventually, you’ll build new businesses and repeat the process. This all takes place on the Property tab, which gives you a birds-eye view of the city. Dulcie serves as a tutor through all this, walking you through the early steps of the game.

Meanwhile, the Talent tab lets you manage your talent. Here, you can level them up, which increases their attack strength and hit points, which you’ll need in boardroom negotiations. It also makes the businesses you assign them to earn more. You obtain new talent by earning character shards, which you get by completing tasks. Once you have enough shards for a particular character, you unlock them and they join your talent pool.

Boardroom Battles

City of Cash keeps you moving along by giving you tasks to complete. These include hiring more employees and leveling up your talent. Periodically, the game will tell you to complete a story stage. This takes place on the Story tab, where each chapter of the story is divided into stages. Completing a stage involves walking down a street and picking up coins and cases, which contain all sorts of goodies. You’ll also be faced with business decisions along the way. For instance, to improve recruitment, you’ll be given a choice: increase salary or focus on mission. Each choice offers different potential benefits (and downsides).

At the end of each stage, you’ll have to face off against a competitor. This is where your talent comes into play. Negotiating plays out as a sort of combat, with each of your talents attacking your competitor. The goal is to reduce him to zero hit points. If your talents are strong enough, you’ll succeed. If not, you’ll have to level them up and try again. Each attempt costs money, although this was never a problem, as I always had ample cash. However, leveling up talents requires gold coins, which are in much shorter supply.

City of Cash is free to play and there are no ads. There are, however, plenty of microtransactions. You can buy monthly passes, CEO packs, and Top Up packages, each of which gives you various benefits. These include diamonds, which are yet another type of currency in the game. Diamonds can be used in the Diamond Mall to buy rare items such as blueprints and expansion permits. They are hard to come by, and the easiest way to get them is to buy them with real money.

Rampant Sexism

It’s impossible to talk about City of Cash without addressing the rampant sexism in the game. Dulcie, and the rest of your female talents, all look like pin-up models. The more conservatively dressed ones wear short, tight skirts and tops that show off ample cleavage. Mind you, these are supposed to be business executives. Meanwhile, the male talents are all fully dressed. Also, during the game you’ll unlock the ability to dress your secretary in different outfits. This includes a maid outfit that looks like lingerie. Again, this is supposed to be your secretary. This seriously detracts from what is otherwise a mildly fun game.