These Doomed Isles

A great game which ultimately is heavily hindered by its slow progression, making it hard to keep it fresh fast enough. Part deckbuilder, part city sim, part civilization, These Doomed Isles is a fun and engaging game. In the Campaign, which serves as a long tutorial, you will learn the mechanics of the world. Through card play, in the tradicional deckbuilding style, you will develop your city with an arbitraty goal depending on the map you are currently playing. You build/create things on your island with cards you buy at regular intervals, and unlock new cards through research. The island itself is a puzzle you have to manage due to the limited space and certain buildings needing optimal placement. There is some light combat where units may attack different locations of your island with the goal of destroying your city. For defense, if you have the respective cards, you can convert a worker into a warrior, or build defensive buildings, or use damage cards directly on the units (invoking lightning). There is a polyomino mechanic while placing buildings or using damage cards, which is another interesting puzzle. The Challenge game mode feels more roguelite, as you start the game with a character of your choosing, each wiith different cards at their disposal, and as you make progress you unlock more cards for that character's deck. Now, and this is my only complain so far, the progression is very uninteresting. A normal challenge run gives far too few credits, which you spend to unlock cards, also considering there are five handicaps you can choose from at the start of each run, which are credit multipliers. And this is where it misses the goal for me. The new cards shouldn't be so heavily guarded, because what's fun is to build different stuff and trying to pull out good combos in an already difficult terrain. I feel like my experience could be so much better *right now*, but instead I have to grind runs with stale cards so I can unlock the fun. A note to the devs: If your game is based around cards, don't make it a chore to unlock them. It's the variety in the builds that keeps a player engaged, not the grinding of in-game currency to unlock the actual game. Non the less, it's a very unique game with a wonderful art style at a good price and it's worth the try.