A nicely presented tile merging/adjacency resource bonus kind of game, but the experience playing has room to improve with some really unfair map generation possibilities and some awkward pacing when you basically complete the objective early.
- My favorite part of this was the presentation, like the tiles being at visible heights so you could have an idea of where the water might rise to, before the nice 2 step warning of yellow/red notifications, it was nice to see and interact with.
Though simple the animations helped give some extra life to the tiles as you played with them too.
In general I think there was a good collection of possible combinations to interact with on the island, with +/-'s that you could make sense of.
For the amount of changes that happen when you move/combine tiles, the presentation of the value changes was well designed-though darkening the tiles in the affected radius would be nice.
- Regrettably after my 4th attempt at island 5 had me start with -11 food, I had to stop playing there.
I think the method of generating the board, food requirement and map size began to hurt the gameplay and pace at that point instead. Some more time customizing the generation could really strengthen the experience.
I like that all the characters that will reach the island are stuck on tiles in the surrounding area, with a great touch of them jumping/jumping less for the first then second group coming up to join. However it would be nice if that information was more immediately present, like a board similar to the total count that was to the right of the current islanders with a '+X', of however many will join after you act.