App Review: Harmony Isle

Harmony Isle is an iOS game available on the App Market. The basic premise of the game is similar, infact amlost identical, to that of many others on the App Market - one that springs to mind is The Tribes. 

It is your basic 'build a town' game - you must build houses to increase your population of workers, and then use these workers to collect resources from various buildings such as the diner, where you collect food to power your little men and the diner where you collect wood for building. 

There is however one twist to this game which differentiates it from many others on the market, and that is the need to maintain a balance in your town between Nature, Social and Science. This is fairly easy to do and hasn't hindered my progress so far. If everything is in balane then you collect a bonus from each of your resource buildings. 

The game is also a time management game (as expected with these sorts of games), so you'll need to wait anything between 3 minutes and 3 hours to collect your resources, depending on which task you've assigned your little workers. 

The graphics of the game are pretty good, but not exactly mind-blowing. If you read the description on the app store then you'll see that the game boasts '3D graphics', however you can't rotate the camera more than about 75 degrees, or zoom in orout very far, and you can't even rotate buildings and decorations which makes customisation quite difficult. Many buildings such as the Science lab can't be moved at all, which may leave you (as it did me) with a lovely neighbourhood of houses right next to a laboratory. 

  

Game play is pretty slow, although I found it quick and easy to move up the levels my progress was hindered by the fact that I was unable to build any more houses after I had maxed out the number of cottages and houses I was allowed to build, and had too few workers to keep the resources coming in while also trying to upgrade buildings and construct new ones. 

I am now on level 13 and have reached a population level of 12, but to do this I had      to upgrademy restore two buildings, upgrade them several times, upgrade the town hall twice and build a metal working place so that I could collect metal in order to build a villa. I also spent 45gems building a manor, but that was to increase my science level. 

Although I can understand why the makers of the game would want to make progress slow - after all if you could complete the game in a day or two then they would make hardly any money from gem sales etc, but I really think that the progress of this game is too slow - to the point where it becomes frustrating. 

I will probably keep playing for a few days but if my experience doesn't improve then I think this game will be getting removed. Overall a good town building game, but doesn't really bring anything new into a market that is already saturated with games of this type. 

My Rating: 3/5