I was always a fan of the very elusive genre of city builders. For a time, immemorial there was only one king, one true ruler of this narrow category of games — Sim City. Of course, when there is a monarch, there are many squires who try with vehement passion (or lowly trickery!) to copy and imitate, and so we always had various city builders sprout left and right, trying to be more thematic, to tackle something unique. But since Electronic Arts did what it does so well, Sim City was toppled from its throne and gave way to Cities: Skyline as the obvious go-to game for anyone who desires a dabble in raising and upkeeping a functional city.
There is but one thing that is universal to this genre — it is time-consuming. You slave over hours upon hours to let your city grow, to accumulate wealth to sponsor even bigger, more daring projects. You dig into such games as a complex and vast wedding cake, burying yourself in the various layers of their intricate design. They were always demanding games — both of your time and your focus. But what if someone took the whole genre, squeezed the bare minimum mechanic out of it, and made it into a game?
Here comes Islanders! A city builder that is more a puzzler, a conundrum machine, than an actual game about infrastructure. And yet, despite its deceptive banality, it hides plenty of trial and error in its basic ways. Islanders is a devious game — it tosses you into this cute, charming land of low poly shapes and saturated colors. It offers you a few buildings to raise and rewards you points for placing them in some smart way. Smart how? Well, by following some basic logic, of course! Lumberjack scores more around trees. Farms score high near a mill. Houses want to hug that town center to ka-ching you some big score. And that’s it. That’s the game. You put puzzle pieces into place trying your best to score enough points to get a new slough of buildings before you run out of pieces to place.
Here lies the elegance of this simple loop. The rules are easy, the pieces you work with are rudimentary in their function, and yet you must display formidable foresight in your planning and placements. Not only does it get harder and harder to reach that sweet threshold for getting new toys to work with but the place on your small island becomes a valuable commodity!
And then, the buggers, toss you some huge buildings out of the blue! Oh, they promise mad points and tantalize you with a wide zone of control, but hey, the game didn’t tell you about them when you were amassing your houses and mansions and now you struggle to even find a spot where they will both fit and still earn you a decent jump in your progression bar. It might not be a race (it is, though, but let’s return to that in a bit), but it still will toss you into many daring scenarios that will need at least some mental exercise to get right.
Otherwise, though, the game has no ending as far as I know. It just… continues. You jump to a new island and start anew with even bigger goals and harder tasks. The game will push you and it will keep pushing until you cannot find a way and finally find that defeat that was always looming in the distance. But the ride there? It’s spectacular. The islands are lovely to look at, the simplistic low poly designs charming and coming alive to form a cute city when you amass enough of these buildings together. The tunes are relaxing, soothing, and sweet, giving that gentle and unobtrusive ambiance to work with. It’s fitting — the game is an experience in zen mixed with some abstract puzzler. It feels luxurious, like a wooden logic box or a marble set of chess.
The game itself might’ve become a tad repetitive, but fortunately, we have another great way to entice our gameplay — achievements. They offer new challenges to aspire to, like for example time-related missions, where you need to jump to new islands at breakneck speed, forcing you to become quite adept in optimizing your placements and testing your capabilities of quick planning. It might not be much for someone looking for something unique further down the line, but it is still a great addition to prolong the fun.
In the end, Islanders is a great distraction for a few hours. The great power of this little charmer lies in its flexibility, as it can offer some gentle mind-boggler for some evenings. Never demand more than a few minutes of your time, if you want to mess around a single island, or an hour or two if you are trying to test yourself against the game's growing difficulty.
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