These Doomed Isles
- September 25, 2023
- Triplevision Games Limited
Get on Steam"These Doomed Isles" is a survival city-builder game with roguelike deckbuilding mechanics, where you play as a god raising land from the sea and defending against invaders. Choose from 4 unique gods, harvest cards to build settlements and strategize in run-based gameplay. The game plans to add more content throughout early access, with advanced buildings and strategies to discover.
PC
Steam Deck
Windows
Reviews
- The game features a great core design with intuitive deckbuilding and diverse gods, each offering unique play patterns and strategies.
- It is highly replayable, with over 40 distinct strategies to explore across different characters, making it engaging for players who enjoy experimentation.
- The game has a charming art style and combines elements of city building, deck building, and tower defense, providing a fun and satisfying gameplay experience.
- The game suffers from significant balance issues, with some cards being overpowered and early game missions varying greatly in difficulty, leading to frustrating experiences.
- There are numerous bugs and performance issues, including memory leaks and a poorly designed UI that can hinder gameplay.
- As it is still in early access, the game lacks depth and content, with some players reporting that it becomes repetitive after a few hours of play.
- gameplay18 mentions
- 17 % positive mentions
- 67 % neutral mentions
- 17 % negative mentions
The gameplay is a blend of deck-building, base-building, and roguelike mechanics, offering a mix of exploration and strategic combat that can be both engaging and challenging. While the core mechanics are easy to grasp, players may find the unique traits of different gods and the balance of difficulty to be complex and sometimes frustrating. Overall, the game shows promise with its replayability and evolving mechanics, though it requires further balancing and polish as it continues in early access.
“The game's base mechanics are easy to pick up and understand, but each god's individual traits and cards are unique enough that it can take some time to get used to, especially if you play one god for a long time before switching to another.”
“Great mix of base-building, deck-building, combat, and puzzle gameplay - and it's only in beta!”
“Quaint pixel art and simple to pick up gameplay, easy to understand resources and challenging balancing of roguelike random card availability and maps whilst defending what you've built from regular waves of enemies.”
“But exploring new islands is otherwise mandatory to give you enough space to play, unless you build a deck with large land cards, which feels like sidestepping the intended gameplay pattern.”
“Mechanics are often confusing.”
“I'm literally doing level one and the boss is doing 50 damage to everything I built and I do 3 damage here and 3 damage there... this is beyond unbalanced. On top of that, when I'm about to kill the boss, he what looks to be enraged and gets 250+ life. What is this dumb mechanic? This needs balancing badly for this to happen on the first level; that's pathetic.”
- story4 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 25 % neutral mentions
- 75 % negative mentions
The game's story aspect is largely criticized for its lack of depth, with some players noting that the missions vary significantly in difficulty and completion speed, leading to a frustrating experience. Additionally, several users pointed out that there is essentially no narrative to engage with, making the gameplay feel disconnected from a cohesive story.
“The story is virtually non-existent.”
“I had to repeat a tutorial mission over five times because I kept losing all my followers in the first three turns.”
“The start of game missions vary intensely in difficulty and completion speed, making the star system feel trivial at times and extremely easy at others.”
- replayability3 mentions
- 100 % positive mentions
- -33 % neutral mentions
- 33 % negative mentions
The game offers high replayability due to the diverse strategies available for each of the 40+ distinct characters, allowing players to explore various approaches. The relaxed pacing encourages experimentation and adaptation, enhancing the overall replay value, especially with the anticipation of future playable gods.
“Very replayable: strategies for each individual god vary widely, with at least 40 distinct strategies across the characters.”
“I deeply look forward to more playable gods in future updates.”
“The pacing is quite relaxed, allowing you to build to mitigate shortfalls in certain resource areas, but damage control and replayability are high.”
“The pacing is quite relaxed, and you can build to mitigate shortfalls in certain resource areas, but damage control and replayability are lacking.”
- grinding2 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 100 % negative mentions
Players find the grinding aspect of the game to be tedious, particularly due to a cumbersome user interface that complicates unit repositioning and understanding game mechanics as the island expands. Many feel that the amount of grinding required is excessive, suggesting it may demand an unrealistic time commitment.
“You'll need a second life for grinding.”
“The UI still needs a lot of work; unit repositioning is tedious, and it is not always easy to know why things are happening as your island gets large.”
- graphics2 mentions
- 50 % positive mentions
- 50 % neutral mentions
- 0 % negative mentions
The graphics are highly praised for their brilliant art style, which complements the game's overall aesthetic and enhances the experience.
“Brilliant game, love the art style and the music.”
- stability1 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- -200 % neutral mentions
- 300 % negative mentions
The game's stability has been noted as somewhat lacking, with users reporting bugs and a generally rough experience.
“The game is a little rough around the edges and buggy.”
“I experienced frequent crashes that made it hard to enjoy the game.”
“There are too many glitches that disrupt the gameplay experience.”
- optimization1 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- -200 % neutral mentions
- 300 % negative mentions
Players report significant performance issues, particularly outside of combat, with frame rates dropping drastically in the late game, leading to frustrating gameplay experiences.
“Performance outside of combat is still broken; I can easily lose half my FPS late game. If I keep playing, I am forced to count the seconds I need to wait between each frame instead of the number of frames per second. It's ridiculous.”
“The optimization is severely lacking, leading to frequent stutters and frame drops that ruin the overall experience.”
“Even with the latest updates, the game still struggles to maintain a stable frame rate, making it frustrating to play.”
- music1 mentions
- 100 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 0 % negative mentions
The music in the game is highly praised, with players finding it to be a standout feature that complements the art style beautifully.
“Brilliant game, love the art style and the music.”
