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

5 Things I'd Like to See in The Sims 4

The Sims 4 is the fourth instalment in EA's multi-million dollar game franchise for PC and Mac, although previous versions of the game have also expanded to consoles, it will probably be a while before you can play The Sims 4 on your Playstation, Xbox, or Wii.

   

If, like me, you have been a fan of The Sims since the original Sims game (remember the one where you'd have to 'make out' with your partner to have a baby and a crib would appear? Then after a few days the crib would turn into a child and be stuck like that forever) then you probably have some high expectations for The Sims 4. 

The Sims 3 is an enjoyable game, but if you ask me the franchise sort of peaked at The Sims 2. There were better expansions, better characters and you could actually create a new town in a matter of minutes without the painstaking difficulty of placing 10,000 spawners and having to create every road and place every tree. Anyway, I'm not gong to use this post to complain about things I dislike in The Sims 3, instead I will share with you my hopes and dreams for the Sims 4. 

1. An easier way to switch between households WITHOUT losing their active opportunities, wishes and career progress.
   
   I don't like to play one family through the generations, I like to play the neighbourhood through the generations. I like to watch my neighbourhood change and grow, and I like to be the one who makes the changes. I've recently been playing my own world River Valley, I created a family who wanted children, but I wanted them to earn a good bit of money first so I could do-up the house to make it a luxurious family home. The best option for me would have been to play another family for a while, allowing my sims to rake in the cash while I concentrated on some of their neighbours. If I had done this however, I would have lost the Have a First Child wish, and the lifetime happiness points for completing this when I finally got them to have a baby.
   
   This brings me on to my second point.
2. More options in Story Mode.
   
   
   
   
   Story Mode is a wonderful thing in some ways, but in other's it's diabolical. I had this plan once, to marry up everyone in Sunset Valley, Mortimer and Bella would marry, and Bella's brother Michael would marry Holly Alto and I'd create two power-families. Of course, Bella and Mortimer are children when you begin a game in Sunset Valley and Holly and Michael are teens so marriage is a no-no! While I waited for them to age up naturally I played some other families - Jamie Jolina married Christopher Steel and Judy and Jack Bunch had another baby. By the time Mortimer had aged up into an adult, Story Mode had moved the Bachelors out of town, so my entire plan was ruined. Story Mode should be editable to player preference. The problem I described in point 1. wouldn't be an issue if there's been a little button I could press to disable inactive households from vanishing from my town.
3. More stylish options for clothing built in to the game.
   
   
   
   
   Anyone who plays The Sims 3 knows that base game clothing options are usually on the basic and/or ugly side of the spectrum, then we are charged quite expensive amounts to purchase premium content, and that's not always fashionable. Clever simmers who know how to download and upload from sites such as Mod the Sims  aren't burdened by this, unfortunately I'm a bit of a technophobe when it comes to downloading and unzipping files and I would probably end up killing my laptop.
4. More realistic traits.
   
   
      
   
   If you had to describe the personality traits of your best friend what five terms would you pick? Confident? Shy? Silly? Sarcastic? Mine would probably be Funny, Pessimistic, Clever, Ambitious and Lazy. That combination might sounds like it contradicts itself but you don't know my best friend. He's a bit of an oxymoron. My point is that I have never in my twenty-one years heard someone describe another person as Never Nude or Can't Stand Art. The creators of The Sims 3 seem to have gotten confused between traits, likes and dislikes and talents. Having a Green Thumb is a talent and not a trait, and Hates the Outdoors is surely a dislike? If they had worded some of these better then they would work - Never Nude could become Reserved and Hates the Outdoors could become Indoorsy. I just think that there could be much better traits in The Sims 4 and that the developers could look into this.
5. A mature expansion pack.
   
   
   
   
   There are a generation of players out there who have grown from children, to teenagers to adults while playing The Sims, and I am one of them. While I understand that mature themes aren't for everyone, and so an expansion back containing more mature themes would need to be given an appropriate age certificate, I think it would be a good option for older Sims players who want to add a little realism into their games. I also think that it could help to bring in new players, there are thousands of people out there who play online simulation games such as Second Life and I think that the Sims 4 could try to appeal to them too. What of your Sim could become addicted to nectar? Or have sex on the couch? I know that a more mature game isn't going to be for everyone, and many people will argue that The Sims should keep it's innocent and comic status but a mature expansion pack would make mature themes optional.
   

App Review: My Town Animals

My Town Animals is an iOS game (you might be able to get it for other platforms as well, I'm not sure). I downloaded it about a week ago, and as a lover of anything that requires a little imagination, where you can create your own town, I was hooked! 

The overall concept of the game is great. You control a little town and you are responsible for fulfilling the dreams o it's inhabitants which are cute little animals - ranging from parrots who want bird-houses to elephants that want to travel to Fiji. The 'create your own town' theme of the game is one that many other apps provide (such as Shipwrecked, The Meego, and My Town 2 Getaways), but this game seems to do it much better, and unlike many other apps it isn't constantly asking you for money. 

The graphics of the game are also really good and the things you need to buy for your town (buy in-game with coins you earn from your businesses, not literally buy) are well priced. 

After only a day or two of playing he game however it was constantly crashing. It started with the odd crash now and then but the crashes became more frequent, and now I can rarely play it for more than a few seconds after loading without it crashing. Whenever the game crashes I also lose all my most recent progress. 

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, installing it on David's phone and closing down the game completely and nothing works. I've also noticed on some online forums that other people are having the same problem, and can't find a way of fixing it. Now it's just a case of waiting for the next update. Hurry up and update this game Booyah because it's amazing ad I need to play it! 

Overall this is a great game, but it's spoilt by the crashes, making it a truly awful game.

My rating? 

1/5