Developer Kedlin, in association with Pocket Gems Publishing, has released Meter Maid City for iOS. The game asks the user to step into the exciting world of parking enforcement in Meter Maid City. Your objective is to hunt down and ticket illegally parked cars and earn cash to develop the Meter Maid City.
The user starts off as a trainee, and there is a nice tutorial where one learns how to place tickets or tow the cars. And in order to make the tutorial fun, you also get to race the real cops who I found to be very annoying bunch.
As a junior enforcement officer, you are out in the city looking for casual offenders to habitual offenders. In each instance of Meter Maid City, user drives around the city in a scooter, with the scooter on cruise control. And the good thing is that the scooter turn around at corners automatically without any input from the player. However, you can swipe on the screen to change lane to avoid oncoming traffic or avoid the two truck. Similarly the user can speed in the direction of the moving scooter to increase speed or in opposite direction to decrease or even stop the scooter.
Since most of the driving happens automatically, the user can focus on finding the culprits. If a meter is red, player can drag a ticket from the dashboard to the vehicle before it passes by. If a vehicle is parked illegally in a handicap spot or in the fire lane, player can give them a tow ticket. Once you give a tow ticket, the tow truck will come and take the vehicle with it and clear out the space immediately.
As you progress you will run into offenders who don’t pay their tickets. For such culprits, you have access to parking boots which will stop the offenders from moving their cars till they pay the ticket. Even though parking boots are free, but they are limited in quantity. So you have to go back to the impound in order to get more in case you run out of them. And you can do so by clicking on the map icon on the left bottom of the screen and drawing your route to the impound. Once you are there you can equip your scooter with more parking boots. There is also option to carry traffic cones for blocking users from parking in specific spaces along the street and more.
Remember the serial offenders whom I talked about earlier, well you can track them using the DMV Database. Go to DMV Database and flag them. Now the game will highlight these cars in orange in the game, so it is easier to spot them and drag a parking boot on their vehicle.
You are required to complete certain set of missions relating to specific rank in order to get promotion. Occasionally there are also special bonus missions which you can play to earn extra bonus cash.
As you play the game you earn money which you can use on upgradation of your existing scooter or buying a new scooter. In addition, users can spend their money on upgrading the overall town, building additional blocks to patrol, etc.
It is a nice enjoyable game though I wish it had a landscape mode available for iPad. You can download game from here.