These Doomed Isles

About

"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.

Genres & Tags

Play Modes

Single-Player

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84%

Audience ScoreBased on 147 reviews

gameplay6 positive mentions

story3 negative mentions

Great core design with intuitive deckbuilding and economy elements.
High replayability with diverse strategies across distinct gods, each offering unique play patterns.
Engaging mix of city building, tower defense, and card mechanics that keeps players invested.

Significant balance issues, with some cards being overpowered and difficulty levels inconsistent.
Current version has bugs and a UI that requires polish, making gameplay experience frustrating at times.
Limited content leads to repetitive gameplay after a few hours, with some players feeling the game lacks depth.

gameplay
36 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
17%
75%
8%
The gameplay is a blend of base-building, deck-building, and roguelike mechanics, offering a unique experience with each god's traits influencing strategy. While the mechanics are generally easy to grasp, players may encounter balancing issues and randomness that can lead to frustration, particularly in early levels. Overall, the game shows promise with its engaging mix of genres and replayability, though it requires further refinement as it continues in early access.
- “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.”
- “A lot of replay value already and each god switches up the gameplay in unexpected ways.”
- “Im 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.”
- “Mechanics are often confusing.”
- “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).”
story
8 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
62%
38%
The reviews indicate that the game lacks a cohesive story, with missions varying significantly in difficulty and completion speed, leading to a frustrating experience for players. The absence of a narrative element is highlighted, as players focus more on the gameplay mechanics rather than any engaging storyline.
- “☐ no story”
- “First, I had to repeat a tutorial mission 5+ times because I kept losing all followers in the first three turns.”
- “The start of game missions vary intensely in difficulty and how fast they are to complete, and so the star system (how fast you have to finish) is sometimes trivial, and sometimes extremely easy.”
replayability
6 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
33%
17%
The game offers high replayability due to the diverse strategies available for each of the 40+ distinct gods, 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 is high.”
grinding
4 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
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.”
graphics
4 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
The graphics of the game are highly praised for their brilliant art style, which complements the overall experience alongside the music.
- “Brilliant game, love the art style and the music.”
stability
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
150%
The game's stability has been noted as somewhat lacking, with users reporting it as "a little rough around the edges" and experiencing various bugs.
- “The game feels a little rough around the edges and is quite buggy.”
- “There are numerous bugs that disrupt the gameplay experience.”
- “Stability issues make it hard to enjoy the game fully.”
optimization
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
The game's optimization is severely lacking, particularly outside of combat, where players report significant frame rate drops that can reduce performance to the point of counting seconds between frames. This issue is described as frustrating and detrimental to the overall experience.
- “Performance outside of combat is still broken; it's easy to 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 amount of frames per second. It's ridiculous.”
music
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
The music in the game is highly praised, with users consistently expressing their love for it alongside the art style, indicating that it significantly enhances the overall experience.
- “Brilliant game, love the art style and the music.”

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