Island Tribe 3 Game Review

Rating: 4.5/5.0

Our fun-loving sea-faring natives are back in Island Tribe 3, the road-clearing town-building game! After returning to their volcano-destroyed island, the natives must begin work rebuilding the place. Remove debris from roads, obtain valuable resources and reconstruct buildings. Guide them in their efforts, and help them locate fragments of ancient artifacts and runes that will unlock the island’s Great Temple!

This is the third installment in the Island Tribe time management game series. It brings back the same high quality gameplay that made the first two games fun to play, while adding a few small tweaks and updates to improve the experience further. The story is also a direct continuation of what happened in the previous games.

In the first game, your tribal villagers had to escape an island with an erupting volcano. In the second game, your tribe meets an explorer who leads you to a group of islands that can be settled. However, at the end of that game, your tribe encountered an Altar of Wishes and used it to return to your original island. And that’s where this third game begins, back home after the volcano has run its course. Your goal now is to rebuild the place, and locate fragments of artifacts and runes that will give you access to the Great Temple and to a glorious future!

At first, the game seems pretty similar to other similar “road-clearing” building games (such as the Roads of Rome series), albeit with a beautiful pastel-like color palette. However, you will find that the game does have quite a few layers of gameplay and challenge in it. In addition to the base time management and task-scheduling gameplay, there is also spot-the-object type of gameplay, construction choices to be made, and even the option to score bonus points (by collecting gems) but with the cost of diverting your workers from the main goals.

The basic gameplay involves you directing your limited number of workers what to do, such as clearing debris from roads, repairing or upgrading buildings, and collecting resources. At the start of each level, you are given a set of goals that you need to complete (along the lines of completing a construction project or collecting enough resources). Most of the map will start out hidden in fog, and you will need your workers to interact with objects at the fog’s edge in order to gradually reveal the map and see what buildings or resources were previously hidden.

Almost every action your workers perform will require specific combinations of resources. These resources include wood, water and stone, with more resource types introduced as you progress through the game. You will have various buildings that will help you obtain these resources, and these can be upgraded (at a cost) to become more efficient. The main focus of the game is to manage your supply of these resources (and decide which upgrades or constructions are more important) so that your workers can complete the level goals before time runs out.

There are also plenty of other buildings and objects that your workers will interact with. There is the boathouse that provides your workers with boats to visit neighboring islands. There are totems that will reveal large chunks of the map once they are repaired. There are large construction projects such as dams that are part of a level’s goals. You might even be tasked with saving innocent bunnies from angry bears!

Now to talk about the layers of complexity that were mentioned earlier. While good strategy will let you complete each level within time limits, that doesn’t mean you have “mastered” a level. Each level also has fragments of magic runes that are scattered across the map. You will need to take a break from directing your workers in order to find and click on these fragments. Once in a while, an artifact will also appear on the map and you are given a short time to find it. Finally, there are lots of gems scattered across the map. You will need to send your workers to collect the gems, which means pulling them from other essential tasks. You will only be a “master” of a level when you can complete the level’s goals, assemble the complete magic rune, find the artifact and collect the gems, all within the expert time limit.

The game can be pretty challenging, and has a nice story and beautiful characters and art to keep you engaged and entertained for hours. It isn’t too different from the previous Island Tribe games (except for a few updates), but why fix something that isn’t broken? You will like Island Tribe 3 if you enjoyed the previous games as well as other “road-clearing” games such as the Roads of Rome or My Kingdom for the Princess series.

Check out the other games in this series!

Related PC Games at Big Fish Games: