These Doomed Isles is a city-builder that employs the use of cards. There are a few modes and several factors to juggle that will make you question if it’s worth trying to save these people.
Spoiler: I didn’t like the game and this is not an endorsement post. Let’s talk about it.
Skirting by the fact that there are three modes, one of which is five levels of hardness. Let’s just cut to the chase and say that even on creative, I still managed to royally screw up my island. This is not a cozy game unless your brain loves the escape of juggling too many balls.
You are a god and you start with one little relic on an island. Around you, there are other islands that you can connect to for more followers, resources, or even treasure chests. When you reach those islands, you get a triggered event that lets you decide between two randomized things.
That isn’t important; what is, however, is your cards. You start with a few cards to use completely at random.
By ending a year, you go into a harvest screen where you can use the money you made to buy more card options. Usually, these are not useful, so you have to spend 2 gold to reroll your cards. You can do this over and over looking for a single useful card and still not get the ones you need.
So, why is that frustrating? Well, you need these cards to build up your settlement. You need forest cards to get wood. To cut it, you need to build a facility to cut the trees down. However, they have to be adjacent to the structure, or it won’t matter.
Do you feel lucky on These Doomed Isles?
Great. So, you need resources and buildings to get those resources. Well, then, you need the bodies to do those jobs, so you need cabins. Tough luck if you don’t ever get the cabin cards. Then you have to worry about happiness, food, gold… each of these things requires a building with enough bodies to run them.
These Doomed Isles boasts that everything is randomized and I’ve found that even on the easiest settings, this game doesn’t work on chance. If you’re bricked from even a single resource, you’re toast.
Let’s not get into the fact that every year, you’re going to be invaded by enemies and that to combat them, you need a crossbow tower or palisades. This is also ignoring the fact that you need to answer prayers that may require you to expand, have 20 buildings, etc.
Oh, did I mention that buildings built outside of the tiny relic zone generally give you a negative impact?
These Doomed Isles feels like playing the lottery or gambling and it just wasn’t fun. So, what do you do at that point? You go to creative.
I’m gonna sing the doom song now!
I failed on creative. I got in a situation where I was able to build a cabin, a fishing dock, and plant trees. I used all of my gold trying to find the building that let me cut trees or at least pan for gold and I got stuck with nothing.
If you thrive on a chance-based strategy, give it a whirl. But, man, this one just wasn’t for me. Honestly, it’s a good thing we don’t give scores to early-access games. That’s all I’m saying.
If you want to try These Doomed Isles, you can try it out over on Steam. It’s in Early Access for $14.99.
If you want to check out something that I absolutely loved, then you can check out my review of Botany Manor.
No Comment! Be the first one.