We’ve seen deserted island simulation games before, but most of them involve surviving against the elements or building a functioning society. Island God, a new title from Digital Chocolate, puts a new spin on the familiar formula. As the name implies, you’re not a loin cloth-clad castaway, but an omnipotent deity that has complete control over an island’s inhabitants.
We’ve seen deserted island simulation games before, but most of them involve surviving against the elements or building a functioning society. Island God, a new title from Digital Chocolate, puts a new spin on the familiar formula. As the name implies, you’re not a loin cloth-clad castaway, but an omnipotent deity that has complete control over an island’s inhabitants.
The first thing we noticed about this game is the recognizable presentation. Like a lot of other Facebook games, Island God offers cutesy graphics with Facebook friends’ info along the bottom of the screen, so it seems like you’re able to play with or against your buddies. The game’s visuals are especially bright and colorful, and pay special attention to detail—there’s even a mini-background story that pops up when you launch the game.
Gameplay is as follows: You’ll build constructions on your very own island, and assign natives to perform various tasks. For example, you first must build a totem pole-esque monolith that seems to dispense money, but you’ll need an inhabitant to collect the funds. To expedite your little worker’s task, you can use your “God Power” and complete the task instantly. This’ll cost you Energy, however, which you only have a limited amount of. You can restore this Energy later, when you buy food from the Market. (Gods aren’t exempt from financial stress, apparently. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.) When you bless one of your worshippers, “-1 Energy, +3 Morality” is displayed. We’re still not sure what this entails, but it looks like your decisions yield a decent amount of complexity. Isn’t that always the case for gods? The game seems to be a bit more stats-heavy than some of its peers, which can offer interesting gameplay.
Perusing the heads-up display, we see inventory counters for several resources: wood and stone (“basic resources for constructing buildings,” the game tells us), coins (“expand the island and buy decorations”), crystals (“finish buildings faster and buy the finest items”), science (“used together with discoverable items to invent research items”) and food, which replenishes your God Energy. Looks like these materials can be used in conjunction with your duty delegation—for example, you can assign an island dweller to be a woodcutter exclusively, which increases your wood supply.
The game is still pretty buggy at this point. Lots of crashes during the tutorial (we encountered a new crash after each new step in the tutorial, forcing us to restart the game over and over), but we’re sure this will be soon ironed out. Overall, Island God is an inventive take on the survivor/simulation genre that will pique the interest of any megalomaniac.
