Tiny Isle

A little too simplistic, item descriptions not informative enough, and too much thrown at you in its introductory period (which was a total turn-off). Too much clutter because of item sizes and island size, which in turn compounds another issue, the lack of consistency when attempting to select them. A huge CPU hog, which appears to be a bug, is plagued by stutters, another bug. I backed this game on Kickstarter because it seemed endearing, and I'm still quite fond of the artstyle, its only merit. Still a recommendation from me because I appreciate the effort and how quickly the developer responded to my bug reports; hoping it gets better bit by bit in the future. [b]6/10.[/b]

It has the appearance of a cozy game, but it's WAY too complex and demanding to feel even remotely cozy. In less than two hours, I had unlocked over 40 different plants all with various different abilities that had to be hyper-optimized or else you get stuck having to click 40 billion times per second just to collect the currency the game just pours onto the ground. I don't know what the target audience is for this game. The English translation is also rough, and overall I just didn't think it was a very enjoyable game.

Honestly, there's a lot to like about this game. The graphics are very cute, and there's a lot of variety in the items. However, there's basically no structure to the gameplay at all. You unlock things very quickly, and the item descriptions are vague and uninformative so you end up with lots of options but no real idea what to do with them. The isle starts to feels very crowded with undeletable items. Same with the isle expansion - you can add a lot of land quickly when you don't really know how the game works or how you want to lay things out. Overall, there's no measured sense of progression, just a vague feeling of chaos. The ability to remove ponds by dropping crystals into them is great! I wish there was a similar mechanism to reshape the isle. (There might be, but if so I haven't found it yet in the mountain of different items I have access to.) I wish there was a middle option rather than recommend/don't recommend. The game isn't *bad*, but I really can't recommend it in its current state. The devs could probably learn a lot by looking at Tiny Garden, a very similar game with great pacing and structure. I hope I can come back after a few updates and change the review rating.