I’m currently reviewing a Nokia 5700 for Mobile Philippines. And one of the first things I check out on a new phone are the pre-installed games.

Marble Cannon is a Zuma clone of no consequence. The other game, City Bloxx, is highly addictive for some reason. Simplify SimCity into a challenge of attaining the highest population. Put in an action element that requires great hand-eye coordination. This is the formula for City Bloxx.

Basically, you’re given a 5×5 city grid with empty blocks to populate with buildings of different sizes and population capacities. The more advanced structures become available as your progress, and need to be placed adjacent to the more basic ones. When you pick a building type, the game shifts to the tower stacking mode.

Here you’re a crane operator, dropping the building’s parts on the foundation one-by-one, and timing your release properly for higher points and population capacity. This is the really addicting part, as you find yourself doing buildings over and over again just to stack all the pieces perfectly. And stacking every piece perfectly provides a rare kind of satisfaction.

As you try to complete taller structures, the game gets harder, as you have to deal with the swaying common in high towers. Release at the wrong time, you’ll miss the building stack and lose one of your three tries to complete the tower (which resets every time you build a new tower). Even worse, missing badly might cause some of your previously stacked blocks to fall down.

So, if you use a Symbian Series 60 smartphone (like the aforementioned 5700), get yourself a copy of City Bloxx. It’s an engrossing time-waster, and it lets you pick up where you left off. Eventually the action will become repetitive, and you might lose patience as you build your city into a metropolis through your fine crane-operating skills, but City Bloxx gets a four out of five from yours truly.