Back in 2019, I played a small indie game called ISLANDERS, where you carefully assembled your collection of buildings to try and acquire the most points and progress to the next island.
As someone who often lacks the creative flair to create a beautiful city in a more traditional city builder, I was thrilled that the scoring mechanics of the game just naturally left me with an aesthetic creation.
Combine that with colourful, minimalistic graphics that help your cluster of buildings feel more readable and a soundtrack that instantly quelled any internal annoyance from a long day of work, and it quickly became a personal favourite.
It wasn’t just ISLANDERS, this was the birth of a new genre of puzzle-based, minimalistic city builders.
Three years later, Dorfromantik came along, consumed me for a month, and became the base for what we would see going forward, and now it seems that every few weeks, a new relaxing hexagon-based builder drops into my Steam peripheral.
Now, 6 years after the original title was released, ISLANDERS: New Shores is here to carry on the original game’s legacy. Can it stack up against all those who followed in its sandy footsteps?
First Steps
Let’s take a step back for people who are not familiar with the original game. What even is ISLANDERS? With each level, you will be given a small randomly generated island, frequently composed of various small to medium-sized spaces on different levels of verticality.
While this might not be a traditional turn-based title, at the start of each level, you will be asked to pick between multiple “packs” containing different buildings, and each building will act as a turn. Besides, the game has the Turn-Based Strategy tag, and that’s good enough for me!
Your job is to hit the next scoring threshold to unlock another building pack using the buildings you have available. Repeat this process enough, and you will eventually hit the overall goal for the island and be able to move onto a fresh new island… with ever-growing score targets.
The strategy comes with where and how you place your buildings. New Shores features 44 building types, all with their own scoring modifiers and penalties. A relatively simple house for your city is worth one point.
Still, it also scores bonus points for the prestige of being near the city center, the community of all the other houses around it, and even more for having amenities within its influence. It’s not uncommon for houses to end up being worth 15–20 points apiece, even 25+ points for a truly desirable location.
Now imagine trying to overlap all of these building types for optimum score, and it makes for a surprisingly complex puzzle. Some buildings even come with hefty base negative scores but strong bonus points, meaning you really need to plan ahead to utilise them well.
A Tropical Paradise
Before getting into the meat of the game, it would be remiss of me not to mention the immediate appeal, you get to make some really pretty looking islands. I mean just look at this:
Or this:
The particularly clever thing about this is that none of these placements was an artistic choice. The mechanics of the game naturally lead you to create aesthetically pleasing cities, albeit ones that often have a lot of similar features… more on that later.
Of course, if the main high score chasing mode isn’t your thing, then there is a creative mode so you can design islands to your heart’s content without the scoring constraints.
The soundtrack for the game also deserves a mention, as it is wonderfully calming. Filled with soft notes and background melodies that let you just feel the stress dropping off you as your islands slowly come together.
Much of this is reused from the original title, although the music has been expanded, some buildings have been redesigned for a more cohesive look. I am particularly glad the fisherman’s huts don’t look like malformed balloons anymore.
“New” Shores
So the soundtrack has been expanded and some buildings have been redesigned, what else is new? For a start, the available types of biomes have been greatly expanded.
Some of these, such as the lava-based level, do add a twist to the city building. The player starts off in a tiny safe space amongst an ocean of fire, and the space slowly expands with time.
Snow-covered biomes may cut you off from farming-based industries broadly, though a lot of the biome changes come down to aesthetics over anything else. Most do not cause a significant gameplay difference.
The other major change is the boon system. After each level, you will be given a choice of two island types, which will often come with their own bonus/boon.
Alternatively you will unlock boons at certain score thresholds in each level. Each of these checkpoints will give you a choice between two powers to activate at a future moment of your choosing. They might modify the properties of a building, cause additional flora or fauna to spawn into the level, or even skip the level entirely if you really get stuck.
A particular favourite of mine is the wisp, a fiery entity that bounces between buildings, scoring points from each other to rack up additional points over time.
It really made me think far more carefully about my placements so that I did not risk getting the wisp stuck in a location I couldn’t easily link to. Sadly, the majority of other boons are far simpler, expanding areas of influence or granting additional points.
I would have loved to see some more creative perks because, as it stands, some of the less interesting boons are noticeably better than others (Level Up is particularly guilty of this).
Finally, a suite of new buildings is added that you unlock as you progress, most of these end up serving as “point bombs” that can make or break a level depending on your setup.
There are some interesting ideas here, like the Aviary that keeps a growing base score between your islands, snowballing over time, or the mountain shrine that projects an area below it based on its height.
These are all changes for the better; my main problem is that none of them change the core of the game. I was hoping for an ISLANDERS 2.0, and instead I couldn’t escape the feeling I was playing ISLANDERS 1.2. The admittedly low price point softens this criticism, but I wish there were more additions that actually mixed up the base gameplay.
Building Your Island
Not the end of the world if the base gameplay is good, right? It is… but I have my gripes. When the original ISLANDERS came out, it certainly felt like a breath of fresh air with interesting gameplay to match, but some of that lustre has been lost over time.
There is still a great amount of satisfaction in nailing a good placement and seeing the points just roll in as your potential building options snowball out of control. Yet the more freeform nature of the placement can often lead to you awkwardly wiggling your cursor in an area, trying to find the one pixel where your building is placeable.
The new buildings, on the whole, are a positive. Some existing buildings have had their scoring updated to score based on the area around them rather than just the buildings nearby, which adds some variation.
However, this change also brings some unintuitive descriptions and scoring. After 20 islands, I still can’t reliably work out how best to place pyres, and some key scoring mechanics, such as gatehouses, don’t get a clear explanation.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that none of these changes really change how each island is played. Due to the scoring importance of certain buildings and the fact that many have small scoring areas, you are forced to build densely and will almost always have the following:
- A dense housing area with circuses and taverns.
- A dense manor area centred around a temple.
- A cluster of huts in one particular intersection and a cluster cliff houses in another.
- A defined area for each type of industry/farm
I would have loved to see more additions that helped a player branch off from this formula and promote alternate strategies.
I suspect that to some players, the ability to switch your brain off a bit and have a more defined build is a plus, but by the end of the 20 island high score run (way too long!) I was really feeling the urge to mix it up.
Final Thoughts
I’m being a bit harsher than normal on ISLANDERS: New Shores because I really did adore the first game. As it stands, ISLANDERS: New Shores is the definitive version of ISLANDERS; every change they introduced is for the better, and after finishing my run, I immediately uninstalled the original title.
For the people who have never played this series before, I can happily recommend that you pick this title up because you will easily get your moneys worth, be that in high score or creative mode.
Sadly, where it succeeds as a game, I’m not so sure it succeeds as a sequel. For the minority out there like me who were hoping this would bring new life to the ISLANDERS series, you may be left wanting.
I would have loved to see an evolution of the original game rather than a small update, especially now it’s competing in a much more crowded market. These shores might be new, but the rest of the game doesn’t feel it.
