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6.7 sorta fun
In Island Realms, from Alawar Melesta, you are put in charge of a happy-go-lucky group of big-handed settlers recently arrived at an archipelago in the middle of the Aegean Sea. Or perhaps the Mediterranean Sea. Chased onto the island by a group of grumpy gus ne're-do-wells, your band of merry men decide to make the chain of islands their home. That means colonizing the chain island-by-island and fighting off the grumpy natives who would rather you give up and sail elsewhere!
The goal of this strategy game is to move your wagon of goods from island to island. Your wagon starts at the opposite shore of the island, ready to advance. Your task is to (once you make it to the wagon) use the resources available to fill the wagon with a certain number of materials. Unless it's filled, it can't cross the wooden bridge to the next island (AKA level). All this is nicely glossed over in the short and mostly unhelpful tutorial, so don't feel bad if you get confused and decide to play Flicky using an emulator instead.
Each island is dotted with various waypoints. These locations are preset to contain any of a number of facilities, such as stores, grain mills, stone quaries, catapults, warehouses, etc. (In other words you don't get to decide where to build your lumberyard, you must build it where the game decrees.) Between waypoints are roads, or at least paths where your men will have to build roads if they want to travel.
Before you can construct a building, you'll need to purchase its blueprints from the store.
Everything that can be built or upgraded costs a specific number of resources. Building a road between two points costs one unit of stone. Upgrading your grain mill to level two costs four units of grain and one settler. And so on. Sometimes you won't have the ability to produce resources needed for a construction project, and will have to sell whatever resources you do have at the local store, for coins, and purchase the raw goods you do need. Or trade with a neighboring island if the current level offers a seaside dock. Each facility can only hold a certain number of goods, so occasionally you'll have to transfer resources to your warehouse, or maybe even upgrade the warehouse if you need more storage.
Everything is animated, so you can watch your men move about the island and saw wood, pickaxe stone, jackhammer roads, etc. My grandfather always used to say that one boy can do the work of half a man, but two boys can only do the work of half a boy. The same applies here, for the more men you have at your disposal the quicker things get done. Carrying all the resources to the wagon for the final push to the next island can take forever with only two men walking from one end of the island to the other. But buy some more settlers (at one coin each) and you'll quickly be chugging onward to the next level. (I found it particularly amusing how the little animated men carry the large millstone-sized coins on their backs.)
If Island Realms sounds like an easy, relaxing game... that's because I haven't mentioned the native tribe yet. These mean-spirited and heavily-armored fellows mean to keep you from settling their archipelago! They have forts on most islands, and regularly send out troops to stomp apart your roads, steal your resources, block your access with walls, and even catapult your buildings! Not only that, but they rudely knock over your men whenever they cross paths with them, slowing down your progress even more. Luckily they're extremely superstitious, so your men can temporarily keep them amused by building idols at certain waypoints. When the enemy footsoldier passes by an idol, he'll be unable to resist the temptation to hoot and dance about.
(Hint: You can always tell where the enemy is going to attack because a lightning icon will appear over that structure.)
Strategy mainly involves clicking quickly and often to keep your men constantly producing goods, for until you can build catapults or walls or even upgraded idols to halt the attacks of the natives, you'll be repeatedly rebuilding structures and losing goods to raids. The graphics and music are interesting, but I wasn't quite taken with this game - perhaps I'm more used to RTS games where you can build structures wherever you like.
Island Realms really needs more of a tutorial than it has. It took me a good thirty minutes before I understood the way the store/dock worked (with its different-colored arrow buttons) and what the required resource popup tooltips meant. But I've been called stupid before, and by simpler games than this one! When the enemy was blitzing my settlement and all my men (the ones not knocked to the ground) were rushing about, I found it quite tricky scanning the level for the best way out of the jam.