Island Robot Farm

🌴 Island Robot Farm Review 🤖

I picked up Island Robot Farm because it gave me Rusty’s Retirement and Forager vibes, two games I absolutely loved and I’m happy to say it completely lived up to my expectations!

The art style is adorable, with bright, charming visuals and the cutest little robot helpers you could imagine. The game’s cozy aesthetic really makes it a joy to watch your island come to life.

There’s a great sense of progression here. You unlock a wide variety of buildings, upgrades, and crops as you play. From vegetables and fruits to beautiful flowers, there’s always something new to grow. Even better, the game gives you total creative freedom to design your island however you like, you can place land tiles freely and shape your island’s layout to your own taste.

Here is my finished Island:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3583877726

As you expand, you’ll unlock important facilities like power generators, oil rigs, and other production buildings that keep your island running smoothly. Most of your new unlocks come from purchasing sea plots, which gradually expand your map. Each new plot costs more than the last, but there are a few other ways to unlock content too (no spoilers!).

Because this is an idle game, a lot of the fun comes from setting up your systems and letting your robots do the work, collecting money, power, oil, and other resources while you sit back and watch your island thrive.

The robot system itself is one of the highlights. They’re cute and efficient, and it’s satisfying to see a small army of them buzzing around. BUT I did run into issues with their assigned areas not working at all, which was disappointing. Still, I found that having plenty of robots on hand made up for it. I also experienced a couple of crashes while decorating and rearranging items, probably because I was moving a ton of stuff around at once but overall, performance was solid.

To 100% complete the game was pretty straightforward and took me around 58-60 hours in total. The most time-consuming achievements were the ones that required storing large amounts of money, but since the game is idle, it was mostly just a matter of patience.

In short, Island Robot Farm is an incredibly charming and addictive little game. It’s packed with content, satisfying progression, and that relaxing “just one more unlock” feeling that keeps you coming back for more. At its price, it’s an absolute steal. If you enjoy cozy automation and idle games with personality, don’t miss this one.

Happy farming, robots! 🌾

Tip: If you want to find more reviews like this, check out our curator page Moon's Tea House

It looks great and the basic idea is good, but I can't really recommend it at its current state. The robots - which are the one of the main highlights of the game - are clunky. Default behavior is very suboptimal and if you want to improve them, you need to spend a lot of time digging through the menus: select the bot, change behavior, set priority, set area, adjust area size. Then you need to do that for every. single. bot.

Wanna see which bot you're done configuring? You can't. Wanna see which bots are assigned to a specific area? You can't. You'll need to click on every single bot and pray you find the one you need. The bots moved and you lost track of which ones you already checked? Welp, start over and click them all again until you find the one you're looking for.

But wait, there's an option to name them! You can make a workaround by assigning coordinates and setting them as names so you know which bots are configured and assigned to which area! Except you need to click on a bot to see its name. So you end up needing to click them one by one all over again.

The game doesn't even remember the last options you chose. It doesn't remember the window size and position you last played at. It doesn't remember the last options you toggled for your bots. You enabled the 'show work area and range' on your bots so you can check assignments? Well, be prepared to toggle them again when you relaunch the game since that option is now reset. Go ahead, click on every. single. bot. and reconfigure them again. They moved while you're doing that and you lost track? Start over.

Sounds like a lot of wasted and frustrating time for an idler and really clunky for an automation, doesn't it? Seeing how this is a completed release and not early access, I'm not even sure if they can (or if they're willing to) address those major pain points.

Automation modes are broken in a way that causes a lot of wasted time while also requiring close inspection to realize it's even happening. For a truly idle game meant to run in the background, wasted time is a cardinal sin.

It's a shame because the concept of the game is appealing and I wanted to keep it.