Keep your fingers a-tapping and tower-building in iOS sim Pocket Minions

Given that two of SiuYiu's previous games - CastleCraft and VegasTowers - were respectively an online city-building sim and an online tower-building sim, it's no surprise that Pocket Minions is a tower-building sim.

Unlike those other games, however, this is a single player simulator; think more The Sims with individual levels than The Sims Social.

Set in a medieval theme, you have to build up your tower, storey by storey, making sure that the little people who live in it are happy and productive.

So far so Tiny Tower you might think, and while the game is reminiscent of NimbleBit's classic, SiuYiu can claim prior art, at least in terms of VegasTowers, which predated Tiny Tower by two months.

Anyhow this game is much more about micro-resource management, and that includes direct manipulation of your inhabitants or minions. (You can pick them up and thrown them around if you like.)

These are recruited (or created) when you build a new facility - hunters in the Hunters' Lodge and loggers in the Loggers' Lodge etc.

If you keep the toilets clean and the furnaces alight, everyone will happily produce their special resource - logs, rope, nails, swords, food etc. These are required to create complex facilities, that in turn provide the items you need to create more complex facilities.

When each resource is ready, the appropriate icon will appear above the minion and you simply tap to harvest.

However, when your inhabitants get angry - maybe there aren't enough toilets, or it's too cold - production will drop.

Some may even turn into thieves and steal your product.

This mean you have to create guards to arrest them and dungeons to hold them, not to mention ordering your guards to fight the dragon which will appear and breathe fire onto your tower.

If it kills any minions, they could turn into shadowy ghosts, giving the other minions a right scare. You can exorcise them, however.

All-in-all then, Pocket Minions always gives you something to be tapping on, minions to be managing, or a resource to be hoarding for the next new facility.

Of course, you can streamline your progress through the ten levels by buying crystals - the in-game currency - which is used to speed processes.

Pocket Minions is available now as an universal app, priced 99c, €0.79 or 69p.

You can see how it plays in the following video.

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