Wed Jul 27 2022
Minor bug fixes
Isle Builder: Click to Survive is a standard but competent entry in the idle survival genre. It’s less about 'survival' in the high-stakes sense and more about optimizing your resource production. You start with nothing and eventually build a thriving island economy. The clicker elements are well-balanced; you never feel truly stuck, as there's always an upgrade just within reach.
The art style is cute and functional, though the UI can get a bit cluttered once you have a lot of buildings and survivors to manage. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it’s a cozy experience for those who like to see bars fill up and numbers go up. It’s perfect for background play throughout the day.
Intuitive tap-to-craft mechanics
Idle resource generation
Base expansion and customization
Rescue and manage survivors
Tech tree progression
Don't spend all your time tapping. Focus on building the 'Lumberjack' and 'Stone Mine' as soon as possible to start generating resources while the game is closed.
Assign each survivor to a task that matches their skills. Keeping your survivors fed is the only way to keep production at 100%, so prioritize the farm.
Yes, once you have assigned survivors to buildings, they will continue to collect resources for a set period while the app is closed.
The game isn’t bad by any margin. It’s a fun game with tons of hours you can dump into it when you’re bored. It even does what the ads say and isn’t a complete lie on download (a rarity in today’s game store)! The issues start arising after you get about an hour in and two/three tiers of buildings in. So the way this game works is by collecting resources with villagers and building stuff to get off the island, mostly requiring you to build lvl 1 buildings and upgrade them to do what needs to be done. Cool, got that and the progression makes sense. … except it doesn’t. The storage is very small for resources that you can collect and the buildings require more than what is on the map at times. 50 storage capacity for a tier where buildings require 800+ of that resource. And for some reason, the gathering of resources in storage is 1 at a time instead of what seems like 5+ at a time from the actual resource spots themselves. Which makes getting resources out of storage consume more time than actually mining it from the source. It seems to punish players for using the storage system, when it also requires that storage system to unlock certain buildings and their later tiers. The progression is flawed and forces you to spend more time collecting than is needed and drains the map of resources faster than it can reproduce them. Not a bad game, but the resource management is atrocious.
Do not spend money in this game. You will lose it when the game crashes and you can’t restore purchase. You just lose all the crates you have bought even if they have not been deployed. Also you will wait forever for workers to gather materials but then they just stand around and never start crafting. So you have to restart game and then you have to began collecting materials from the beginning, and you you had used crates that you bought, you have lost that money. There is no way to recover the money that was spent just because the game crashes. Developers need to reimburse for such instances. Apple needs to be aware that there is an app that is crashing and causing individuals to lose money and with an ineffective restore purchase button. If this is by design then that is straight up theft. There is no app support from game developers and there is no way to recover money that is lost from crates that you buy because when the game crashes you lose the crates that you bought whether or not they have been deployed or if they are still in your bank it’s still resets to zero and you were still charge the money.
It’s a cool game but it needs improvement. Storage capacity is way too low for the amount of resources needed to complete jobs. What’s in your storage is all that can be used when the game isn’t open, which doesn’t allow anything to get done.. if there is a job the people are working on it needs to keep getting done, even if the app isn’t open... then players can return to a completed job and are able to start a new job. There’s also nothing to do in the game besides watch your people chop down trees or mine stones… there’s not extra activities or events that you can do. It’s gets really boring just staring at the screen waiting for a job to finish…
I downloaded this game cause the ad I saw for it flashed the words “ad free” several times during its’ ad, each time it played. I don’t mind games that give an option to watch ads to get perks or help advance the game faster, but I do NOT appreciate games with forced ads. And to have the pop up come up every 5 mins stating “remove forced ads” for real cash money is not what an ad free game does. I play a couple games which give me an option to watch ads to get extra goodies that don’t interrupt gameplay with random ads every couple of minutes. I will be deleting this game soon as I’ve finished my review. I doubt this’ll show up in this games reviews, but I figured I’d give it a shot. This would be an ok time filler game if the ads were either non-existent (seeing as their ad states ad free) or just voluntary, but I’m not wasting my idle time sitting thru 1-2 mins of forced ads for every 1-2 mins of gameplay.
I enjoy these types of games and believe me when I say, I have over 100 different games on my phone that I have played and enjoy or am currently playing. Biggest issue I have found so far with this is as usual, the ads. Not the worst with ads but still fairly annoying. I understand using ads to speed things up or get boosts or bonuses but when you get ads randomly during nothing, it gets annoying and you lose interest easily. Besides that, it’s not bad. I’ll personally continue trying it for a few more weeks and see how I like it but I know the ads will kill it for some people.
My x2 invites are fun cause one works on gathering food while the other runs off screen and is never seen again. Another fun hiccup is when all your ppl are crafting something, they’ve gathered and assembled all of the materials required and look like they’re crafting but no actual crafting is being done. This brings me to my final hiccup; when the stuff above happens all there is for me todo is close and reopen the app which is annoying for the very fact I have to do that. I paid for the overpriced package with no adds and free power ups but I feel the above should get me a reimbursement cause that’s just ridiculous.
I find this game very fun, easy and relaxing but the only issue I have is having the game open. If I wanna build said item and get on Facebook or another app while my people are building something I can’t. If I don’t have the game open and on screen they won’t work which I find useless. Especially when it requires a lot of material to build something, I’ll have my phone open on the app for more than 30 minutes to build said item and can’t use my phone until they finish building whatever they needed to build which is sad. Other than that I love the game.
So I’ve been playing this game pretty religiously for a while now and I want to like it, but I can’t. 1. It feels like you guys ran out of money while developing, had to submit an unfinished/unpolished game. 2. There are only three levels… what? 3. There’s no way to control your castaways. 4. There’s no point in doing the large material upgrades since you can just do the bare minimum and complete the game very easily. There is no challenge. 5. Your little minions don’t gather materials unless you’re watching the game play itself. 6. It’s not an idle game, but it’d be better as one. 7. Why is it that food and trees need a respawn time but rocks and ore don’t? 8. Why increase your tower size/antenna if the less people you need to rescue at the end the better? There could’ve been something here, I even bought the no ads option, because I saw the potential but it just wasn’t there. Anyway, enjoy my money, but honestly I can’t imagine paying for this experience again. There just wasn’t anything there. It could’ve been more.






