Video Games Archives - Page 27 of 35

Hades: A Game I Never Thought I Would Play

Hades has fun in spades

Let me preface this by saying two things: I’ve never enjoyed any of the roguelike/rogue-lite games I’ve ever tried and I’m also an extremely cheap person.

In the past I’ve tried games like Enter the Gungeon, Risk of Rain 2, and Immortal Redneck and just never enjoyed them. It might have been the lack of an interesting narrative, or of gameplay that really grabbed me. It’s also hard to justify spending $10+ dollars on these games when I could purchase other games I knew I’d like. So despite trying the aforementioned titles for a bit, I always ended up refunding them. Perhaps playing them for a bit longer might have changed my opinion about the games, but I don’t like forcing myself to try to have fun.

I’d been struggling to find a new game that I could put a good chunk of time into for about six to eight months. I’d end up in a loop of playing PUBG, Halo MCC, Valorant, and the occasional spree modding Skyrim, playing it for a bit, then forgetting about it. This was the loop I wanted to break free from.

Fast forward to September. I open up Steam, and a banner for Hades pops up. \ Greek mythology, fantastic artwork, soundtrack seems like a banger from the trailers, and “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews galore! This looks like a great game! The trailer has me sold until one word pops up: roguelike.

Well, shit. It can’t be that bad right?

So I buy it, play it, die at the first boss, and refund it.

That could have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. I couldn’t get this game out of my head, (mostly because Steam kept slapping the banner in my face). So twenty-four hours after I returned it, I purchased it again, and decided to give it another shot. I’d just play it once more, I thought.

And then I didn’t stop.

The story of Hades is told through the interactions between the protagonist, Zagreus, the son of Hades, and those he meets along the way as he attempts to escape his father’s domain of the Greek Underworld. He has some, um, daddy issues and he would like to run away to Olympus. Yep, that’s basically the premise without any spoilers. Despite what my crappy synopsis might imply, the characters and story are complex and rich. Every character interaction either adds to the story, allows for character development, and/or is just plain funny. It’s exciting when you see a dialogue bubble pop up, informing you that someone has something new to say. The characters all have their own personalities, from the residents of the Underworld who want to keep Zagreus locked up, to the Olympian gods themselves, who are keen to see their nephew leave the Underworld and his father behind and ascend to Olympus. The voice acting is on point; as Yahtzee put it in his review, every character seems to be voiced by someone incredibly sexy in real life or an actor in a Bond movie.

The combat is incredibly smooth, responsive, varied, and so much fun. There are six weapons for you to choose from, once they are unlocked, and each comes with a unique play style and upgrades. Add to that the various “boons”, or power ups, presented by the Olympian gods and you have an incredible variety of builds you can use on any given run.

Each time you beat the game, you can increase the difficulty of your next run to not only be more challenging, but also increase the rewards you receive upon completing it. I found myself tinkering with different boons, weapons, upgrades, and difficulty modifiers a lot, with no intention of beating the game but just to see how viable the build would be.

Of course, doing so meant that I died, a lot.

Once you die, you show up at the House of Hades to be reprimanded by the God of Death himself, telling you that there is no escape. Eh, whatever daddy-o. All the resources that Zagreus gathered in the past run stay with him upon death, which you can use to increase his powers and abilities. This added RPG element ensures that you feel more powerful, more prepared for the next run. In addition, there are mini-story progressions and additional unlocked dialogues, even in death, which provides a small sense of advancement even in failure.

For all the praises that I’m rightfully singing for Hades, I wouldn’t call it perfect. The biggest issue I had was that once I found a working combination of weapon, boons, and upgrades, I found it fairly easy to beat the game by aiming to collect those boons and weapons. After my fifth or sixth run with the same build, it started to feel stale for me. Now this is partly own fault; I didn’t feel like trying to break out of a working formula, but I wished the game tried to encourage switching up builds a bit more.

Trying out a new weapon felt like a inconvenience at first, but you truly get to see how each weapon/boon combination handles different scenario better than another. For example, I primarily used the spear with an Athena/Poseidon boon combination which worked very effectively for the general mobs. However I found my DPS against bosses to be lacking. Switching over to the bow with an Artemis/Ares combination however, bosses simply melted. So it really does fall on the player to experiment in order to master each weapon and bring out its true potential.

If there is one word I can use to describe Hades, it would be refined. Maybe even polished. There is no aspect to this game that feels like it was added as filler, no element that makes me roll my eyes and curse the developers for a minor inconvenience. I cannot praise this game enough for what it is. Hades is right up there with Metal Gear Solid V and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice as the best game I’ve played in 2020. It is smooth, it is engaging, and it is fun. And fun I believe is what matters most when it comes to a video game. Hades has that in spades.

Call it $20 very, very well spent.

Ed Note: You can buy Hades in a variety of places, including the Epic Game Store, and Steam. It’s also available on Switch, and I believe the other two consoles.

Genshin Impact

Free to play, more expensive then a trip to Vegas if you actually want to buy anything in game.

I’ve been wanting to write about Genshin Impact, but I’ve had a hard time doing so over the last week. This is because Genshin Impact might be the highest quality free-to-play game ever made, but discussing the game without talking about the monetization model would be crazy. It’s like discussing a tiger, without mentioning the teeth or claws, and just discussing its fluffy-wuffy tail. Let’s start with that fluffy tail though.

Genshin Impact is a free to play RPG for everything except your Nintendo Switch. It has cross-play for pretty much everything, and cross-progression for everything that isn’t a PS4. You can actually close the game on your PC, then open it on your phone, and just… keep playing. The same game. From where you left it on your PC. You can do cross-play between phone, PC and PS4. It’s incredible.

And when I say RPG, I mean RPG. You’re presented with a massive world to wander around, search for treasure and do quests in. There are world bosses, and hidden secrets, and all the good stuff. Mechanically, the game borrows a massive amount from Breath of the Wild. You can just climb up mountains and hills and walls, and you also get a glider fairly early on which lets you drift around.

The combat system is also pretty neat. You build a party of 4 characters, and as long as you aren’t in a Domain (Dungeon) or combat, you can swap characters out as you wish. Each character has a weapon type, basic attack, ability, and ultimate ability, all on separate cooldowns. Each character also has an element, and elements interact in various ways. For example, if you launch an Anemo (wind) character’s ability into an area with fire on it, it will Swirl, and create a fire tornado. Put ice onto a character affected by water, or vice versa, and that character will freeze. There are about seven of these elements, and in addition, things like walking through puddles will make both you and enemies wet.

These abilities can be used outside of combat to light torches, trigger pressure plates, and do other puzzly stuff. You can even use ice attacks to freeze and then cross lakes and oceans. Theres an entire quest line that requires you to take advantage of this to get to a hidden island that doesn’t even show up on the map.

Moments like this are Genshin Impact at its best. When you’re just running around, fighting monsters, climbing terrain, and discovering things, you might even forget you’re playing a free to play game, and if I had any gripes with the game as it is, it would most likely be that the climbing behavior can occasionally be a bit funky. You can climb all over every mountain, and every hill in the game, and there is treasure everywhere. Every mountain top has hidden collectibles, there are puzzles in every cave.

Okay, so now lets talk about the bad part.

If the moment to moment gameplay of Genshin Impact is Breath of the Wild, the meat of the game’s advancement system is classic mobile gacha. If you’ve ever played Puzzles and Dragons, Azur Lane, Fate Grand Order, or Dragalia Lost, you’ve seen this sort of thing before. You have Resin (Energy) which recharges over time and is used to collect treasure from world bosses and dungeons. These include advancement materials that are used to increase the max level of your characters and weapons, books that are used to upgrade their talents, and artifacts that can slotted in to give set bonuses, and extra stats.

You can spend in game currency to refill your energy, and honestly, as frustrated as some people are by Resin, I don’t take too much issue with it.

What I do take issue with is the drop rates and costs of the Wish system, the system by which you get new characters, and most of the higher rarity weapons. I refuse to call these micro-transactions, because there is nothing fucking micro about them.

ONE roll of the Wish system is 160 Primogems/Genesis Crystals. A SINGLE ROLL.

These are the prices, and after you buy the first time bonus, they change to this.

$	Primogems / # of Rolls
0.99	60 / .33
4.99	330 / 1.83
14.99	1090 / 6.06
29.99	2240 / 12.44
49.99	3880 / 21.56
99.99	8080 / 44.89

So if you’re looking at this, and thinking, “This seems a bit expensive,” then yeah. It fucking is. But here comes the kicker: the drop rates are AWFUL.

The Wish system in Genshin has multiple different tables you can choose to roll against, usually called banners. For the featured character in a banner, the drop rate is 0.6%, or 3/500. The drop rate for an weapon OR character of the highest rarity is 1.6% total, or 2/125.

Ed Note: I think fractions do a better job illustrating how low this is, which is why I’ve included them here.

Keep in mind, a single roll costs $2.20 at its cheapest, if you buy the $100 currency pack. This gets you just over 44 rolls.

There’s also a pity system in place in which if you haven’t gotten a weapon/character of max rarity after 90 rolls, you will be given one. I want to point out that the real money cost of 90 rolls is just under $200. At this point, if you’re rolling on a featured banner, you will have a 50% chance to get the featured character. If you don’t, you’ll be guaranteed to get them at the next pity roll. Which means at this point, you’ll have to have spent over $400.

TLDR: If you want a FEATURED character in Genshin Impact, they can end up costing you $400 for a single copy of the character. In addition, the game has system by which characters are powered up for each duplicate you get of them. So getting a character to their max potential requires you to get receive them 6 times.

So yeah. That’s the state of Genshin Impact as of today, an incredible free to play game that is unmatched by anything on the market, with what I’m going to call “Macro-Transactions” that can easily total the same price of a new PS5 to get a single character. Play it. Enjoy the story, the anime bullshit, and the voice acting. Explore the incredible world, scouring every nook and cranny for treasure, and climbing every mountain.

But please don’t spend money on it.

The Case of the Missing Publisher or How Ammobox Studios got their game back.

An Interview with Jeremy Choo, CEO of Ammobox Studios.

Last week, a really interesting Reddit post caught my eye. It was by a smaller game development studio from Malaysia called Ammobox Studios. The post was a warning about how their game had almost been stolen by their publisher, and how the fraudulent publisher was potentially back in business.

While everyone has heard stories about shitty publishers, one of the surprising things for me was that Ammobox was able to actually recover their game, and continue development. I wanted to know more, so I reached out to Ammobox, and was able to talk to Jeremy Choo, their CEO and Founder.

(F) John “Fritz” Wallace: Hi Jeremy, just wanted to say thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. To start, can you tell us a bit about yourself and about Ammobox Studios?

(J) Jeremy Choo: Well, I’m Jeremy Choo and I’m the founder and CEO of Ammobox Studios. Ammobox was started back in 2008. My game development background actually started with modding, with stuff like Warcraft and Starcraft. When we were first founded, we started with doing some outsourcing work, and this project [Eximius: Seize the Frontline] has always been a bit of a passion project for us.

It’s a garage project, something we’ve done in our spare time and I’d say we’ve been thinking about it for almost 10 years. Development actually started in an entirely different engine. We started full time production in 2018. And as part of this, we started looking for a publisher.

So, this is where Eduardo Monteiro and his company, TheGameWallStudios comes into the picture. How did you meet him, and end up publishing with him?

(J) When TheGameWallStudios first approached us, they weren’t the type of publisher we were looking for. Another member of the team, our business developer, an experienced guy who had worked in industry, was handling our publisher discussions. And one of the people he brought up was TheGameWallStudios and Eduardo Monteiro.

Our business developer came to me and said, “Look, I’ve found someone we might be able to work with. He’s really keen, he’s got a publishing background, he worked with big companies before, and you can check out his background, his LinkedIn looks good. He’s got funding, they’re doing things bespoke, one title at a time.” It sounded very convincing! But even at the end of his pitch, some of the other co-founders didn’t really like it. So, GameWallStudios was not the type of publisher we wanted to go to.

Sometimes, because of what happened, I think people will take the wrong message from our experience, which is to never go for a small publisher. I want to go on record and say “That’s not the case!”

There are small publishers that do really well, even with small teams. I have several friends with teams about that size who do well. I want to mention this because the moral of this story isn’t “Small Publishers are Bad.”

In either case, at the end of the day, I ended up letting our business developer make the call. The thought was, “Since we don’t have another publisher, and this guy is promising a lot, but doesn’t necessarily have the reputation to prove it, let’s structure the contract so if he doesn’t keep his end of the bargain, the contract automatically terminates.” So we got what is called a performance-based contract, and drafted it out with a lawyer over here in Malaysia.

So the lawyer comes back and says “This looks pretty standard”, and we go forward with it.

It never really occurred to us to think about the ultimate end: “What if this guy just doesn’t care about the contract? What if he just vanishes?”

You’d been careful: talked with lawyers, drafted a contract that would protect, but had trouble finding a publisher. So at this point, you decided to take a risk with TheGameWallStudios.

(J) In our mind, we had nothing to lose, right? We didn’t have a publisher, and if things go wrong, he takes his cut, we go our separate ways.

This next bit is sort of personal for me, but at this point we’d been rejected by a lot of big publishers. Most big publishers will never really want to take a chance on a first time team. They say things like “there’s too much risk” or “you’ll never be able to execute.” And even if they are interested, they’ll want to wait and see how the game does in Early Access.

So we thought, if big publishers aren’t interested, let’s go after the small guys, let’s find an underdog. Someone like us. We didn’t really tell him that, but we were thinking about it. We thought, “He’s small, but so are we.”

We were a four man team trying to build a first person shooter/real time strategy hybrid. We were trying to punch above our weight class. And it felt like Eduardo was the same way, in trying to publish and work with these smaller indie games. He was like us.

In hindsight, we definitely made the wrong choice there.

Just as a quick aside, do you have any idea why you might have had such a hard time finding a publisher?

(J) So, Eximius was our first major title. We’d published smaller stuff before, but when we met with publishers, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And I think that was kind of a turn off. What we did know is we wanted our publisher to get more copies of the game out and get the word out. What wanted strong Esports support, strong influencer marketing, and tie-ins, people to do write ups on sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, stuff like that. Very cliche stuff and regular stuff.

I think the Esports support is probably the most unusual thing there. And of course Eduardo did mention that he was very much into Esports competitive gaming, that he knew how to get this and that. It’s all a bunch of lies at the end of the day, but we thought it would all work out.

Back to the story at hand. You have your contract, you’re getting ready to launch into Early Access on Steam. When did it start to feel like something was wrong?

(J) So we were going to try to get a write up from Destructoid, and we were going to reach out to some specific influencers. So, the game launches, we’re expecting to see a write up, some ads, something. And none of these promises are followed through!

I reached out to the Destructoid employee we were in contact with to ask if Eduardo ever followed up, and he says “No, he never did.” So the game launches, and I find that we have no write ups, no marketing, no ads. And this was when we realized that something is really wrong here. Then all of a sudden, Eduardo starts becoming harder to contact, and starts to disappear.

What do you mean by started to disappear?

(J) Well, I say he disappeared, but it was actually a pretty long time before he fully vanished. So right after we launch, we ask him where the marketing is. And he goes “Don’t worry, it’s coming, it’s coming.” And around the same time, we had a tournament planned with a company called Triforce Tokens, that does some crypto-currency stuff. So we were putting a lot of effort into the tournament, recruiting teams, putting up marketing.

So about two months after release, we’re talking with him, asking for the money, asking for money from sales of the game. He keeps buying time until he can’t anymore. He keeps making up excuses. First he tells us there was a problem with the bank, then he tells us he was in a car accident. At some point I went to my co-founders and said “What’s the contingency if he just disappears?” And then finally, right in the middle of the tournament, he vanishes.

That sounds pretty rough, to say the least.

(J) When this whole thing took off, it was very chaotic for us. We had a larger team, we were backed up on salaries that we weren’t paying, and we were thinking “Okay, well if we don’t get the money out, we’re gonna be dead.” Like, in a month. We’re still in active development on the game, we’re still running this tournament that we have to pay out prizes for, and we haven’t told the community anything. It was just too much going on all at once.

And people are still buying the game! But we’re not getting a cent. We’re supporting the game, we’re pushing out bug fixes. People are asking about the price and such, when the game will be on sale, and we’re thinking “We don’t actually have any control over this!” So we had to keep our game faces on.

So at this point, he’s dropped off the face of the earth. You’re in the middle of a tournament, you don’t have access to any of the money from your game. How did you go about getting your game back?

(J) First thing we did was find an indie friendly lawyer in the UK. [Ed Note: Eduardo Monteiro and his company, the TheGameWallStudios does business out of the UK, which is why Ammobox had to do this.] This person tells us to wait for the termination clause in our contract to kick in, and when it does, we’ll send him a letter to terminate the contract. He also gave us examples on how things could go if Eduardo responded. So for a pretty nominal fee we had him send that letter.

At the same time, we had been reaching out to Steam. We were lucky enough to have had a contact at Steam that we had just met. Steam had just come to Malaysia around the time we launched. So we met some of them and asked “Hypothetically, let’s say all this is happening, what could we do?”

They told us “Well, we can’t actually just take the game from his account and give it back to you, we can only do it if we get a court order.”

But they did tell us that we could put out a DMCA so that he couldn’t sell the game anymore. Because at this point, not only is he stealing the game, he’s also stealing the money from the game sales. So this Steam contact told us “If you can’t get the money, don’t let him have it.” So that’s what we did.

A DMCA is pretty easy to do. The content owners are obligated to take the offending content down, and then decide what to do with it. It’s shoot first, ask questions later. It can definitely be abused, but in our situation it was a bit of a lifesaver. Steam had to take the game down immediately. We sent the letter on the 23rd of December, and they took it down from sale at the start of the new year.

Then I realize that I can see his strategy. He’s trying to get as much money out while he can, so he has the game on sale at other storefronts as well. We had to DMCA them too. And finally we were able to get everyone to stop selling the game.

Honestly, a lot of the law stuff felt very pay-to-win. If we had the money, we could have gotten an injunction and gotten the bank accounts that the various digital storefronts were sending money to locked. If we had won the case, we would have gotten him to have to pay our lawyers fees. And because he was using his home address as the address for his company, I think it would have been possible for us to seize his assets or something, even if he declared bankruptcy. All the clauses in the contact say he’s in the wrong. He can’t argue his way out. This isn’t a case of “Well, we got screwed by the contract” or something. He just took the money and ran.

I think he probably knew we couldn’t afford the legal fees. 15,000 pounds (Just under 20,000 USD) may not sound like a lot, but it’s two years’ salary for a single artist in Malaysia.

So, you finally get your game back after talking to Steam, and using the DMCA to block sales of it. This was a while ago at this point. Where is the game now, and what brought all of this back up?

(J) So since then, we’ve gotten much farther. We were lucky to be able to move on. It wasn’t a natural position, I think he expected us to be dead and buried. He tried to crush us to get away with maybe… $100,000? It’s unbelievable to me. But we got out, because of some lucky decisions, and some helpful parties. We got a lot of support from our community, we had some influencers cover it, people bought the game to support us. We did try to run a gofundme to sue him, but we didn’t raise enough money to have it go forward. I think it came in a bit too late, after interest in what was going on died down.

Alright. So, that’s all the mildly depressing stuff, but the story has at least a bit of a happy ending with you getting the game back. I actually wanted to try Eximius, but it wasn’t for sale on Steam. When is it coming out?

(J) Right now we’re close to our launch date, and we’re aiming for Q1 2021. Hopefully, we’ll finish the game in time. No more sleep for us! [Laughs] But I’m feeling confident we’ll hit our schedule. We wanted to release at the tail end 2021, but I think we’ll have a higher quality product if we release it early next year. Right now we’re focused on getting it to 1.0. We’ve restructured our marketing strategies, to get better results. We want a successful launch, and to put this behind us.

Few quick questions, and then I think we’ll be done. What sort of game is it, and given your background, do you have any plans for mod support for Eximius?

(J) Eximius is what I would call an FPS+. It’s a first person shooter, with a real time strategy game also added on.

Regarding mod support, we want to, but it will be post 1.0 if it happens. Right now our systems are constantly changing, and every time it changes, it would break any mods that existed. I want to make sure stuff is really solid before we work on that, I don’t want to break peoples mods. And Steam auto-updates means you break stuff easily. We’re all really big into modding, and if it becomes something we can do, we want to. But right now, we aren’t planning for it.

What are your goals for the game, like after all of this struggle and work, what will make you feel like it was all worth it?

(J) We want to make something that is timeless. Something like CSGO 1.6, Renegade, or Natural Selection. Something that people will be playing for years. Something that there is nothing else like.

How much will the game cost?

(J) Releasing at around the same price, maybe a bit higher. I don’t have an exact price yet, but what for 1.0 is more than double what we have in EA [Early Access] now. Our 1.0 is actually on a separate branch that we aren’t pulling into EA, because it’s a semi-separate game where a lot of systems are rewritten. We’ve released maps/weapons, and 1.0 has double the content of EA. Customizations, squad mechanics, etc, stuff people have been asking for.

Just one last question, one I like to end these interviews with. Anything you want to say to your players?

(J) I would want to say thank you. The games industry and gamers can be harsh these days.

It’s very easy for someone to just buy the game, decide they don’t like it, leave a bad review, and refund it. But our community hasn’t done that, even as we have struggled. So I’m grateful to the people who bought our game and didn’t just refund it. To everyone who has stuck with us as we’ve been on this journey to 1.0 release. We keep these people in mind, and we want to make a high quality product and not disappoint them.

In addition, there were a lot of people who bought the game just to support us, back when this whole thing started to come out, and when people learned what had happened to us. We had hundreds of people buying it just to support us, not even to play the game. We wish they would play it! But we’re still very thankful for them, and want to thank them from the bottom of our hearts.

Thanks a ton for your time, and best of luck with Eximius. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out!

Editor’s Postscript – Eduardo Fernando Teixeira Monteiro is the full name of the scammer mentioned in this article. If you do a few searches, you’ll find that he’s been up to this sort of bullshit since about 2014, and Ammobox isn’t the first group of people he’s done this to. Like any scam artist, he operates at his best when people don’t talk about him, his tactics and what he’s done, so I want to give a huge shoutout to Ammobox for sharing their story, and hopefully making it harder in the future for him to do business.

Minit

Minit doesn’t utilize its unique mechanic effectively, and with that stripped away, it isn’t anything special.

Minit is well made, but I didn’t actually have fun playing it. The art and music is good, but the actual gameplay never delivers on the presumptive core mechanic. There. With that out of the way, I can now make a random introductory paragraph that only serves to set up the rest of the article.

After all the chaos that has been the last few weeks, I’ve finally returned to the itch.io racial bundle in search of gems and weird experimental stuff. And so I downloaded Minit, played it, and now I’m going to write this article. Like I mentioned above, I didn’t really enjoy Minit, but I need to describe the game’s core mechanic first in order to explain why.

Minit itself feels like it’s 2D Zelda inspired. You pick up a sword, venture around looking for treasure, and slowly get upgrades and equipment that allow you to progress further around the world. Oh, and you can pick up hearts to increase the number of hearts you have.

The unique mechanic, though, is that the game is played in one minute increments. At the end of 60 seconds, your character dies, and you spawn in again at your starting point. However, any progress you made in the world remains.

The minimalistic art style is neat though.

And this is my biggest problem with Minit: it barely ever uses this 60 second loop to do anything interesting. Instead, it just forces you to go fast, and to restart over and over again. There were three instances in the game that I saw where the loop was actually relevant. One is a character that doesn’t show up until the last 10 seconds of the loop that you need to talk to, one is plant that you water to grow between loops, and one is an NPC that talks slowly, so you need to talk to him at the very start of a run to see his full message. And that’s it. Not the most exciting things in the world.

Everything else in the game works completely independent of this 60 second loop, and it can turn things into a bit of a slog. While the loop does help by resetting puzzles that you can accidentally make unsolvable, it means that when you start wanting to explore or search for things, you’re on a timer. When you try to fight anything, you’re on a timer. There was one point where I spent several lives just walking around and dying because I missed a small set of stairs that were visible in the wall, and as such, I wasn’t sure what to do next.

I can’t recommend Minit, and I especially can’t recommend it at its $10 price tag. The game is very short, taking me just about 2 hours to beat. It doesn’t do anything interesting with its unique mechanic, and with that mechanic stripped away, it’s a very simple Zelda-esque title. If for some reason you still wanna buy it, here’s the link to itch.io, and it’s also available on Steam.

Islanders

A game with one mechanic has no right being this much fun.

When I turned 30, I realized that I no longer had nearly as much time to spend on games as I had previously. And like nearly every video gamer, my backlog of purchased but unplayed games is very long. So I don’t need any new games.

Then I saw Islanders on sale and was like “what the heck, it’s $2,” and impulse bought it. I’m super glad I did.

Islanders is an adorable and minimalist city-builder. The game gives you a beautiful low poly island, and asks you build a city on the island using just about a single mechanic: it gives you a set of buildings to place down in the form of cards in your hand. There is no inherent resource cost to playing a building. Instead, you try to place them to maximize the points they return.

Each building has a little radius that is shown when you place it, and when you place it, it scores based on that radius. For example, the Lumberjack building gives 1 point per tree in its radius, and deducts points per other Lumberjack in its radius. The Sawmill gives points per Lumberjack in its radius and deducts points per other Sawmill. Most buildings follow this simple pattern. There are things that they want to be next too, and things they don’t want to be next to.

And… that’s basically it. There’s a little point gauge and when it fills up, you get a choice of different types of buildings to add to your hand of unplaced buildings. If you ever place all the buildings in your hand without filling up the gauge, the game ends and you start over.

When you place enough buildings on an island you’ll be able to travel to a new beautiful, procedurally generated island, but you’ll keep your total score. There’s probably some scaling here in that it feels like it gets harder and harder to fill the point gauge the farther you go, but I can’t tell quite what the ratio is.

The beauty of this game lies in its elegance, and how it uses the placement mechanic to incentivize (somewhat) realistic and interesting city configurations. For example, mansions and houses get bonus points for being next to City Centers. Both Houses and Mansions also score points for being near buildings of the same type as themselves. However, as Mansions are worth more points, but have a smaller scoring radius then a house, you end up wanting to place them closer to the city center, since you can’t place them as far out without losing the bonus. So the game incentivizes a city configuration where you have a City Center, surrounded by a small ring of Mansions, surrounded by a large ring of houses!

Discovering rarer building types and how they work is also fun. I always get a little kick out of seeing a clever new implementation of the mechanic, like how Shamans are worth points for each flower in their radius, and deduct points for each City Center… but Houses like to be next to Shamans. So initially your Shamans are in these secluded corners of the island, but then little towns spring up next to them.

And the game is chock full of fun little interactions like this! Some buildings can only be built on cliffs. Seaweed Farms can be placed in the ocean, which is otherwise hard to use. Warehouses get benefits from industrial buildings and city buildings, but industrial buildings and city buildings don’t want to be next to each other.

A nice little touch: there are many different island biomes. Each new island is strikingly visually different, and the terrain determines what kind of civilization you’re going to build! Mountainous islands are worse for cities and better for industrial civilizations because industrial buildings tend not to need to be densely packed.

Another thing I really like is the presentation. Whenever you start the game, behind the menu there’s a slowly rotating panorama of a built up island that looks like it was chosen in order to make a gorgeous backdrop for the menu screen… but it wasn’t! The island behind the menu screen is always the one you are currently working on. This just serves as a testament to how picturesque the game is–no matter what you do, your island is going to end up being menu screen material.

I guess I should try to critique the game, but I could only come up with a couple things I don’t really like.

Between the price point, the gameplay, and the art, Islanders feels like a mobile game. This isn’t actually a problem, it just means I wish they had it for mobile so I could go buy it there too. I felt the same way about Mini Metro, which came out with a fantastic mobile app, so fingers crossed.
Playing and doing well is fun, but losing sneaks up on you. Maybe it’s because I was playing so casually, but I could never tell when I was going to lose. I’d place buildings until I only had 2 or 3 left and then realize “Hmm… I don’t think I’m going to be able to hit the points cap.” Ending with a whimper doesn’t feel great, especially when it’s a long run. And this might be an actual issue with the game if it was more competitive. But as it isn’t, I’d mostly consider it a minor qubbile.

Will I play Islanders forever? I doubt it. But this game is 100% worth its $5 price tag. If you ever want a calming experience to kill some downtime, Islanders is worth picking up. You can find it here on Steam.