Pixel People

I started up Pixel People knowing completely that I didn't enjoy simulator games. They always seem designed to waste a person's time: you click or tap or whatever and your city grows or your crops sprout and you keep clicking and tapping until everything gets bigger and better. But there's no strategy to it; there's no sense to it. You just keep returning to this game and doing what has to be done to make your little world less little. They're linear, they're slow, and they're darn boring after the novelty of their theme wears off.

Pixel People doesn't make me love simulators and it's not so different from the clicking and tapping I'm used to. But it is different enough to give me some hope for people who do play these kinds of games.

Pixel People is set in a utopia that's basically a blank slate for rebuilding the world we know now, except it's in the sky. And functions with one key difference: splicing. Yes, you build buildings and plant trees and move everything around to look the way you want it to look. But what could be the purpose of building a city without building people too? Yep, clones. With a manner of gameplay not unlike that alchemy game you might have played--in which you begin with a few basic elements and combine them in all ways possible to eventually build something absurd like a black hole--Pixel People allows you to make clones to inhabit this peaceful world, by combining various careers to form even more careers and more careers and so on. So when you decide to combine the genes of, say, a police officer and a mechanic, you splice a firefighter and then have the ability to place an appropriate fire station in your city.

It's simple, but it adds some variety to an otherwise stagnant genre. It still didn't inspire me to make the sky my own with a brilliant utopia of shining clones and amusing flavor text, but it did make me happy to see some innovation for once. Plus, although Pixel People is built with the freemium model in mind, it can be played for quite some time (perhaps indefinitely) with no need (or even prompting!) to upgrade or purchase anything. So if you're into the whole "city building," "pet in your pocket" kind of thing, don't skip this one.