ISLANDERS

Came back to this after a while and missed why I liked it first play. The items don't fit right, the rules are kinda frustrating, it should be more enjoyable but becomes a little frustrating quickly.

Chill game, my wife loves it. For me it falls a little bit short, but I'll give it another go in the future. Still recommend

ISLANDERS – The Chillest City Builder You’ll Ever Play 🏝️🏙️

Forget spreadsheets and endless menus—ISLANDERS takes city building to a whole new level of simplicity and relaxation. It's like meditating, but with colorful islands and beautifully minimalist vibes. 🌅✨

You start with a blank slate, a handful of buildings, and an island that looks straight out of a postcard. Your job? Strategically place your buildings to rack up points and unlock even more structures. It’s easy to learn but surprisingly deep, with every placement feeling like a satisfying puzzle piece sliding into place. 🧩🌴

There’s no stress, no micromanaging citizens who won’t stop complaining about taxes—just pure, unadulterated creativity. The game rewards you for clever planning, but if you mess up? No problem! Just hop to the next gorgeous island and start fresh. 🌊🛶

The soundtrack? Absolute zen. The visuals? Clean and crisp, like a fresh sea breeze. And the gameplay? A perfect blend of strategy and relaxation, making it a delightful escape from the chaos of daily life. It’s city building distilled to its most joyful essence. 🎵💙

Whether you’re a strategy game veteran or someone just looking for a peaceful way to unwind, ISLANDERS delivers an experience that’s as rewarding as it is relaxing. Trust me, once you start, you won’t want to leave this island paradise. 🏖️😊

Created with <3

Delightful little city builder, addicting to try and optimise and extremely satisfying to work out. Simple but effective at what it wants to do.

needs more buildings but is a good game overall

I do like the game so far. Its chilling, and easy to play. But i hope the developer accept my advice. Please put the grid for every stuff in the game, so i can easily manage the position of the buildings

its not bad to blow some time but there isnt a whole lot to the game. what you see is what you get, so dont expect too much more out of it. still, its good, its cheap, and fills the niche role of a short time killer

Chill city-builder; It's satisfying to see a city come together, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

Fun minimalist city building. Just enough strategy to keep me engaged, while staying incredibly relaxing.

something i like to throw on and play mindlessly when i have other things going on. sunk a lot of time into this game just trying to beat my own high scores. very fun and easy to pick up for just about anyone!

Very soothing and satisfying puzzle game. As you learn how to build points you'll also build a sprawling city in the process. My go too game when I'm too tired to play anything else.

A free-flowing and less blocky alteranative to games like Dorfromantik, Terrascape and other tile-placing games. Really enjoyable to 100%, requiring some grind but mostly smart planning.
Also recommended for players that enjoy passive games, with great ambiance and less pressure regarding how you build your island, as there is a sandbox mode as well.

nice, relaxing game, until you go for 100%. DONT GO FOR 100%

Game is fun and nice but development seems to have ended and there is little content after 2 hours of gameplay and it just gets repetitive and boring.

I wish I could give this a sideways thumb. It is an okay game and a pleasant time killer. That is different than saying it is a great game.

Good game, cozy feel, lots of fun

A fun game i can keep coming back to. I enjoy that the game can be as competitive as you make it. Wanna chill out and enjoy the aesthetics? Go for it. Want to see how far you can get and try to plan out as far ahead as you can? We got you.

Chill, but not absent-mindedly so.

A very calming and intuitive game. The best part is building the monument, it feels like you're putting a cherry on top of your meticulously crafted city.

I found this game uninteresting and unfulfilling. Though there is a bit of strategy to what and where you place a unit. The amount of brain power, planning and involvement from the user just seems minimal. Keeping at it only rewards you with a high score. No commerce, fortifying, investment, etc. It didn't feel enough like a puzzle to keep me challenged. Too shallow of an experience to keep me coming back to it.

Chill, cozy game. I like the graphics.

A peaceful and beautiful game with easy mechanics. It's perfect for relaxing, pleasant to look at, and easy to lose yourself in for longer than you'd expect. I often pull it up when I just need something soothing to do.

[hr][/hr]

💚good💚

Great game. Super nice and chill vibes.

easy to play and hard to get bored

I found this game very enjoyable. There's just enough to it to make it fun, without being so overwhelming that you have to learn a lot to be good at it.

Nice relaxing little sandbox game but there's no sense of progression, no story, nothing compelling me forward other than achievement hunting. Gets boring after a few sessions.

Easy to get into, but otherwise kinda meh. Good enough though for a bit.

Boring

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☑ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☑ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☑ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☑ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☑ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☑ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☑ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

this game is genuinely therapeutic (I have 2.2k hours on Rust)

I've tried several games in this "genre" of randomized builder games (Dorfromantik, Preserve, and I guess Townscaper) but every time I just find myself wanting to play Islanders instead.

Hmm, I don't get where the fun is yet.

EDIT: After playing a bit more, I discovered you can rotate the buildings (not sure how I missed that in the tutorial—another downside). Unfortunately, the controls for this aren't really optimised (at least for mine macOS M1). However, this made the game slightly more enjoyable. It now feels like something you can open after a tiring day to casually place buildings, rack up points, and progress through levels for a small dopamine boost.

That said, while the game's concept initially grabbed my attention, the gameplay itself still falls short. After a while, it just stops being fun, which is essential for any game. Because of that, I can’t fully recommend it.

The game offers two modes: sandbox and high score mode. I’m not sure what the point of sandbox mode is, as there's very little to do there. High score mode is a more traditional playthrough, challenging enough since you can’t move buildings once placed. The achievements are also a bit puzzling, especially the one about reaching the 21st island. I have no idea how the devs expect players to achieve that under 3 hours—check the community hub for more on that.

As it stands, it's still a refund for me.

This is a beautifully relaxing game. Highly recommend if you want a casual city that allows you to spend as much or as little time as you wish.

Fun low stakes city builder with good aesthetics. The impermanence of the score mode makes it more chill than trying to build a perfect city, but there is a lot of depth to the strategy if you want to explore it and get farther.

멍하니 힐링하기 괜찮네요

Genuinely the best game for busy people.
+: You shut-off your brain
+: You can save, quit, and continue later any time
+: You do not need to learn mechanics
+: Comfortable to use and no lags

You know, how when you work for many hours, you just sit back and mindlessly scroll through instagram / tiktok / linkedin? Not even understanding what you're looking at, just that your brain is overworked? Well, this game is it. Just mindlessly placing houses. Enjoying simplicity and simple graphics.

It will get boring after a while. So I mix this game with other games / activities to relax. Can't manage to play this game for more than 20 minutes straight though, too repetitive. But, to be frank, it costs like one sandwich and one coffee, why not?

Simple and not very time consuming. Play as little or as much as you want.

Islanders won’t captivate many with its moment-to-moment gameplay – not at first anyway. Heck, as a puzzle game, it’s not all that taxing, and as a city builder, it’s lacking depth. What it does, however, is instill a serene sense of zen. Islanders is supremely relaxing and did just enough with all of its little systems and nuances to keep me hooked. There is no time limit and no stress – just chilled vibes and deceptively addictive gameplay.

Unlike a traditional city builder, Islanders has no systems managing resources, population, disasters, etc. Heck, Islander’s doesn’t even have, well, islanders – at all. The name of the game here is to place buildings down on a prohibitively small and interestingly shaped island. If you want to continue placing buildings, however, you can’t just haphazardly plonk things down.

How Islanders works is you select a building pack, such as lumberjacking or farming. Each building in each pack is worth a certain amount of points, and that value changes based on all manner of things. For example, placing your lumberjacking buildings near trees drastically increases the value of each building. This goes deeper, however. Some buildings also grow or decrease in value based on buildings too. Houses and mansions like to snuggle together, but a circus is only really beneficial near houses, and, to make things interesting, is made less profitable if in the vicinity of mansions. I was wracking my brain, albeit in a rather soothing kind of way, trying to maximize my point gain – and I loved it.

The thing is, what might seem like a good idea now, is often not a good idea in the long run. The depth in Islanders comes from understanding how civilization will progress. It may not seem like it, but your island is slowly becoming more advanced, and some of the later buildings are almost designed to mess with your plans. Obvious combinations of early-game buildings suddenly invalidate your late-game buildings. I transitioned from planning my turns for maximum turn-by-turn gains and instead started planning ten turns ahead to make sure my uber-building would net me the maximum value.

There is a limit to how many points anyone can harvest from one island of course. Islanders tackles this by allowing players to move to new islands once they have reached a certain points threshold. This effectively resets the game but retains all accumulated points. Eventually, it will be impossible to gather enough points to unlock new buildings or advance, and the game will end. Scores are then uploaded to the leaderboards and then players can see where they landed.

That’s basically it. That’s Islanders in a nutshell. It’s incredibly basic on paper, fairly simple in reality, but became highly addictive once I let the game invade my soul. I was nearly always put into a dream-like trance when playing, and time just chugged along without me really noticing. Just one more building, one more island, one more run.

The act of placing buildings purely for point gain is noticeably gamey, however. In fact, Islanders might be the gamiest games to release in quite some time. It’s all about those points. The aforementioned lumberjack scenario also highlights some of the game’s flaws. Points are gained when a building is placed, and that’s it. Those points are set in stone. Removing those trees at a later date does nothing. The lumber mills will still be there, doing bugger all, but the points were gained, so why care?

In the standard mode, visual flair and consistency take a running jump. The depth of Islanders comes purely from its points system, and if that doesn’t do it for you, then Islanders probably won’t tickle your fancy. It does make some concessions, however. The game comes with a sandbox mode letting players place things wherever they want, in whatever number they want. If you want to make the island of your dreams, then the game has you covered. I personally find little enjoyment from sandbox modes, but its inclusion certainly helps build some bridges.

One of the ways Islanders got me in the mood for some spaced-out, building slapping fun, is with its presentation. The game is very minimalistic, but in a way that still oozes charm. Everything just looks clean, and the subtle animations on the various structures help breathe life into an otherwise lifeless game. The game even has a wonderfully addictive animation that plays whenever points are rolling in, providing just the right amount of feedback for a job well done.

This is then bolstered by a fantastic soundtrack that evokes this surreal feeling of calm. Even when the game was getting difficult, the music was right there, gently massaging my amygdala. Defeat is a certainty in Islanders, but the game subtly escorted whatever stress I had out of the building. Islanders doesn’t slap, it caresses.

Overall Islanders is a game that I was not expecting to like – at all. It didn’t take long for it to sink its hooks into me and gently coerced me down a winding path of tranquillity. Genre be damned, in a world full of elevated heart rates and perpetual soul-crushing stress, Islanders is a nice break from reality. Its gaminess can be a bit off at times, but for the most part, this is a good hybrid of a game.

Verdict 6/10

Very addictive, although partly reliant on RNG. Overall great, and easy to pick up.

fun casual city builder game, scratches the puzzle game itch as well. thoroughly recommended

Good game, very relaxing, not the craziest biggest one, but perfect for small breaks

Very intense gameplay. Not for the faint of heart.

Honestly its the perfect little ADHD game. I use it when I'm on phone calls and need to be paying attention but need to be doing alittle more than just fidgitting

Meditative, atmospheric, entertaining. Worth it.

Playtime: 7.5 hrs
A relaxing game perfect for a lazy afternoon during weekends. I liked the graphic style and color choices. I will put it in my “pass time” category until I can complete the achievements and hopefully that will be soon.

Slightly challenging but still fairly chill. Fun game!

good game, padded hours due to leaving game open... whoops

very good game if you are bored

Beware: this game is not finished.

Building icons look like they were literally made in Paint. No tutorial walks you through the game mechanics, but afaict it revolves around disregarding the building types altogether and instead try placing it all over the map to find a spot where it overlaps with "bonus" buildings and not too many "penalty" buildings.

You are stuck with 2 modes:
- Place the buildings where the game tells you to ("highscore mode") to maximize points and not get a "game over" screen.
- Place the buildings where you want to ("sandbox mode"), with 0 goal aside from the aesthetics.

I want to like it, it's just boring. There's not enough strategy to be a game, but there too much restriction in how it only givens you a few buildings to go your own way too, so islands develop more or less the same too often.