These Doomed Isles

"Wanted to Love It, But the RNG Ruined the Fun." I really wanted to love this game. A roguelike card-based city builder is exactly my kind of thing — the concept alone had me excited from the start. The art is gorgeous, full of color and charm, and the soundtrack is surprisingly beautiful. There’s a lot of creativity in the way the world grows and reacts to your cards, and at first, I thought this would easily become one of my new favorites. Unfortunately, the fun fades quickly once the RNG kicks in. Far too often, I found myself staring at my hand or deck, waiting endlessly for a card I actually needed to progress. Instead of feeling like I was building a civilization or executing clever strategies, it felt like I was fighting the draw pile. When half your time is spent just hoping for the right card to appear, the gameplay stops feeling rewarding and starts feeling like a chore. It’s a real shame, because the potential here is obvious. The visuals, music, and general idea are fantastic, but the pacing suffers hard from random luck that constantly gets in the way of planning. I wanted to keep playing and mastering the systems, but every run eventually hit the same wall — frustration, waiting, and boredom. There’s definitely a great game buried somewhere in here, and I truly hope future updates improve the balance and card generation. But as it stands now, These Doomed Isles feels more doomed by RNG than by the challenges it throws at you.

+Looks and sounds nice +Some player choice -Feels like a puzzle -Play is chore-like = Neutral review, but since I wouldn't recommend such game for myself = I won't recommend it for you either.

It's very cheap I'll give it that, and it runs ok, but it's just very nothingy. It's almost mobile game level of hand holding, do this, do this, do this, win level. If you want something just to play in the background it may be worth a go, but it's hard to say I had fun at any point whilst playing it.

Don't bother buying it even on sale, the negative reviews are correct sadly.

While theres a good concept and a good game, its balance is not very good and suffers from serious issues with snowballing both in becoming unstoppable really easily if you get lucky with the right cards early on, and in the negative with horrible death spirals where if something goes wrong at the wrong time (often from rng) can leave you stuck in a situation where you require RNG to get the right cards to get yourself out of within a very short time before it becomes inevitable. This is because since the basic core of your economy relies having to replace limited resources that are done with resource cards with limited uses that you purchase from the same shop as everything else. However, these become much harder to get as time goes on as you are adding cards to the shop's pool in order to advance (and anecdotely even when not actively adding to the pool they seem to get rarer over time). While this might encourage you to find ways to create alternate methods of getting this, the game itself doesn't have much alternatives apart from making it a bit more effecient but still reliant on the exact same resource or extremely limited market. While that on its own can just be a trouble for if you are starting on a death spiral, its not the most annoying rng that can just doom a run. As you go to the "Normal" difficulty you get the chance that when you expand to new land, there's a chance for a group of enemies to spawn. While on their own that is a reasonable challenge that you can prepare to deal with, there is an extra layer of rng where it can summon a wave of extra powerful enemies suddenly. Additionally, normally the spawning of enemies if given with a 3 turn warning so you can adjust and prepare, on the "Normal" difficulty it also makes it that if you complete an objective, you can be attacked from all sides by an attack the turn after you complete an objective. These waves appear from all sides, meaning they can spawn from numerous random areas without a pre-emptive marker to even tell you and with stronger forces than the usual waves, so you can be completely wiped out instantly because you happened to complete an objective that can range from "easy enough to accidentally complete just from playing normally" to "going out of the way to specifically complete and having to make unideal choices to get to." So to be clear, the game has alot of potential and nice ideas, and a nice at first base but needs tightening up and polishing. However, it won't be receiving that as the dev has moved on.

I wanted to love this, because the concept is great, but all the 3 factions i've played so far are so unbalanced its not even funny. Every one has one or two obviously overpowered builds that just give you infinite resources forever for free, and there are some neutral cards that just let you go infinite. The idea of civ-lite-deckbuileder is great, but the execution is so flawed. Also, over half of the campaign missions are tutorials for each faction and their unique mechanics, but most of them are so simple its just wasted space, and there's not enough for unique challenges for the campaign. Im not sure what the reviews that complain about rng and difficulty are talking about. You can generate so much resourced out of thin air that you can literally get dozens of cards during the deckbuilding phase, it's impossible you can't find the card you need when you have 300 gold and a reroll of the shop costs 2. I could imagine the few starting turns being so unlucky (for example, the store just refusing to give you food cards, no matter how much you reroll) but you can pick your starting 10 cards, and you can easily make a combo that gives you enough food to last before you pull off one of the dozen infinite combos you can do. I've killed every boss i've encountered in a single turn, some cards are just so terribly imbalanced they ruin the game.

Right, so These Doomed Isles is absolutely cracking when you're actually playing it. It's like someone threw a deckbuilder, a city sim, and Civilization into a blender, pressed the button, and somehow it didn't explode everywhere. Proper clever stuff. The Campaign's basically an extended tutorial where you learn how not to completely c0ck everything up. You're slapping down cards to build your little island civilization, buying new cards at shops like you're panic-buying at Tesco, researching upgrades, the lot. The island itself is a spatial nightmare, limited space, buildings that need to be placed just so, and it's genuinely engaging trying to squeeze everything in like you're doing Tetris with architecture. There's light combat too. Enemies rock up trying to flatten your city, and you can turn workers into warriors, build towers, or just electrocute invaders with lightning cards because apparently you're Zeus now. The polyomino placement mechanic adds another layer of "oh bollocks, where does this fit?" which is lovely when it works and infuriating when it doesn't. Challenge mode is where it goes roguelite - pick a character, each with their own deck, unlock more cards as you go. Should be brilliant. [i]Should be.[/i] Here's where it all goes a bit Pete Tong: the progression is absolutely glacial. You finish a run, you've given it your all, you've been clever, you've survived - and the game gives you about twelve credits and a sticker that says "well done." Unlocking a single new card? That'll be three hundred credits, thank you very much. Unlocking new cards costs a fortune. Yes, there are difficulty modifiers that increase your credit rewards, but here's the thing [i]- why are the fun cards locked away in the first place?[/i] This is a game about building interesting combos and experimenting with different strategies on challenging maps. That's the entire point. Instead, you're forced to grind the same boring starter cards over and over just to unlock the stuff that makes the game actually interesting. It's like buying a Lego set and being told you can only use the grey bricks until you've built fifty identical grey houses. Why would you do that? Despite this frankly baffling design choice, it's still a unique little gem with gorgeous art and a fair price tag. Absolutely worth trying. Just be prepared to do your time in card prison before the real fun begins. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to grind another seventeen runs so I can unlock a card that lets me build a slightly different house. Brilliant.

Abandoned.

Sweet art. Uninspired gameplay. Slow, boring, repetitive. You don't need most of the cards to achieve anything.

Its not bad per se but it is so incredibly boring. Way too easy as well.