The Indie game ISLANDERS is now available for consoles. Building up your own city has never been so peaceful and addictive.
Minimalistic fun
ISLANDERS describes its self as a minimalistic strategy game about building up a colourful city. This is definitely true although I would say it’s more a puzzle game than strategy. You start off on an empty island for you to build up. You can choose a structure out of the option presented to you. Placing the structures you will be rewarded with points. The amount of points you get depends on what surrounds the structures when you place them. Gather enough points to refill your inventory and unlock new buildings. Once your city is big enough, you can either choose to travel to the next generated procedurally island or see how far you can get on your current island.
Strategic/puzzle elements
Each structure has its own rules. For instance, playing the Shaman structure near the seaweed field will grant it more points while being placed near the city centre will deduct points. These points are displayed on the screen. Instead of looking at the rules I just moved these structures to the place where the highest amount of points gained are displayed and this gets you pretty far. Some patterns can be learned to optimize the number of points like never placing lumbermills near a city etc. It’s all about placing your structures in the right areas to get the most points, completing the island and moving on to the next.
A mix between Simcity and Tetris
Every structure switches between a couple of different shapes/types. This can be a little hard but it keeps it interesting. Trying to fit them as close to each other feels a bit like Tetris. Every structure has an area of effect so placing them close to each other grants you the most points. This sadly makes it so that your towns often don’t look that pretty. It’s not like in other simulation building games where there need to be roads and other structures for everything to function. This is bad because it has less strategy but good because it doesn’t have any tedious micromanaging and is relaxing.
What you see is what you get
There is no ending to the game but the game is rather a mobile-like relaxing and soothing game that can either keep you entertained with its simple gameplay or can bore you within an hour of playing. It all depends on how you like to play. I like to play more laid back games as well that have some strategic elements to them. The game to me was a real-time sink with the 5 more minutes mentality. There are no unlockable or other progressions like systems within the game. The first half-hour of gameplay tells you precisely how the other hours will be like. I wish we could have seen some stuff to unlock and earn points towards.
There however is a leaderboard, so if you want you can strife toward the highest score or just relax and chill your way through the game. The high score is kept up until you lose the game which means runs can last hours. This is no problem however due to the save feature as well as the hibernate mode of the Nintendo Switch.
Pet peeves
Because on consoles you play with a controller, it’s hard to place the structures where you exactly want them to be placed. The structures do snap onto each other to make it easier. As mentioned before the game is not about looks so not being able to place pixel perfect is not much of a problem. It’s the best that they could have done with the limitations of the hardware. Sadly the Switch version doesn’t support the touchscreen, not a big deal but would have made for a nice addition when playing handheld.
Conclusion
ISLANDERS is nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking but has mobile phone addictiveness to it. The game might not be as strategic as games like Simcity but has a more relaxed way of going about it. ISLANDERS is definitely not for everyone since there is no ending, story, goal or unlockable within the game. The first 30 min pretty much sum up how the rest of the game is. As of writing this review the game only costs € 4,99, an absolute steal for a game that can last for hours and hours to come.
