Most Popular FaceBooks Games for 2010

In 2009, farm games were all the rage on Facebook. Zynga's game FarmVille took the top spot for well over a year. However, there have been other popular genre's in the social game section. Cooking games drew in lots of fans with Restaurant City and Cafe World at the top of the list. However, in 2011 there seems to be a move towards city building games on Facebook. Most of these 3D building games, draw a strong resemblance to an old video game called "SimCity".

It started slowly with Social City back in March 2010, but since then there have been a lot of building games released on FaceBook. This includes Zynga's effort, by the name of CityVille.

Social City - A straight forward city building. Create new buildings such as factories to earn money. Get people to move into your city by putting up homes in the form of condos, houses and apartments. Keep the your population happy by giving them entertainment such as movie theaters. Unfortunately, Social City is too straight forward. As soon as you learn how to play the game, it becomes boring. There is little else to do.

Vegas City - Released by Digital Chocolate on FaceBook, this game offers graphics and a city that is world's apart from SimCity. Game play is still the same as most other city building games. Build businesses, homes and entertainment areas. Arrange the city to give the maximum amount of money from hotel bookings. Vegas City does seem to take after Hotel City more than CityVille in the fact that you do hotel bookings and reservations. Like FrontierVille there are missions to complete as you play the game.

Big Business - This game stands on its own in a market that is about to be flooded with city games. You don't go around the city collecting money, and having the game automatically do everything for you. Harvested crops? Well they don't get added to a bar instantly. Go buy a special truck that is only used to haul your crops. One of the crops is grain. Build a mill and drive the grain over there to grind it into flour. Big Business plays more like a downloaded Time Management game, instead of a 3D FaceBook and that is a good thing.

RamaCity - The latest city building game to be released on FaceBook in December 2010. At first glance, not a lot stands out in RamaCity. Like CityVille, you are a mayor and you have to keep all the citizens happy to succeed. Along the way, you work with friends to create franchises. This game is not yet released, but what caught our attention was the wind farms in the first screen shots of the game. It will be a one of a kind city building game indeed if players can go green.

CityZen - This is one of the few FaceBook building games that does not look like a carbon copy of "SimCity". In fact, the early stages of CityZen highly resembles a farm. Level up and earn money by throwing up businesses and housing in your city. CityZen is one game that does not put the focus on earning the most amount of money. The fun of the game is trying to come up different layouts and combo of buildings depending on the level you have at the time. A unique feature is the disasters that can occur in the game. You can log in to find your buildings damaged by meteors and other issues, or your friends can help to destroy your place. On the plus side, the damage is not permanent.

CityVille - If there is a popular genre on FaceBook, Zynga has to create a similar game to corner that market. So after the success of Social City, Zynga unveiled their version in November 2010. Players create buildings such as restaurants and stores for shopping. They can also build homes to increase their population. To get even more people into the city, they can build community buildings such as a City Hall, to build more houses, apartment complex and mansions.

CityVille stands out from the other city games on FaceBook because they added a feature that was first seen in FrontierVille. Like FTV, players have a list of missions on the left side of the screen to keep them busy. There are a few issues with CityVille however, add in the fact that there are still tons of bugs. When you play the game, leave and log back in a few hours later, you may find that the game did not save any of the work you put into the game. Another issue is the energy problem, similar to FrontierVille. There are a lot of things to do in CityVille but your time will be cut short because you have run out of energy. It takes energy to harvest crops, unload boats, collect rent, and to collect money from businesses.

So it becomes easy to run out of energy when you have 30 energy and sixty buildings, 20 crops, and 10 boats to take care of. You can receive energy in a few ways including gifting, but nothing gives more than 3 energy at a time. Sending you back to the inventory time and again.

Another issue with this game is that it moves fast. I don't mean that all missions can be completed in a day. I'm talking about leveling up. There are 50 levels in the game, and many players who started on day one, reached level 50 by their second week through natural game play. However, Zynga has fixed the experience points needed in other games and this dropped players down to a lower level, so they may do the same thing with CityVille.