[Developer: Yaw Studios | Publisher: Yaw Studios]
Build Lands is a casual game where you create and recreate a variety of different islands. As you play through the rebuilding stages, you unlock a large range of items like ore, rails, plants, and more. Once you unlock them, these items all become options to use for building your own islands. This isn’t a “bad” game per se, but it’s more geared to those who like to relax and make pretty and lavished places. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, only your imagination will limit you.
Build Lands and Rebuilding Lands
The way each stage works is that you are shown an island from an isometric angle at the beginning before the island is deleted. You then simply rebuild the island as you saw it. After recreating the island, you will get your rewards in the form of items for your own custom islands. And that’s the game, really. Keep doing the recreation process while you unlock more items and options to customize your own islands. There are technically three kinds of islands you encounter through the stages, but the real differences are negligible.
Now you’re wondering, “what else can I do?” Mainly, you can share your custom islands online. The game allows you to save your own custom islands and then upload them online. Once uploaded, anyone can download your island and try to recreate it while they enjoy the design. You can also download other players’ islands to do the same.
Taking Things Apart
Sure, you can make your island six different sizes, but there is nothing more to the game. You will keep getting new islands to recreate, and it’s always that. If you can’t enjoy the islands for the subtle new items or designs, the game will probably bore you. Even though there are some nice-looking places, the game certainly got old fast for me. I was hoping for the recreation part of the game to be like a puzzle, but the game literally gives you an option to rebuild the island layer by layer. It will hold your hand the entire time until you get all the unlocks, or at least the ones you want. Sadly, that gets boring after a dozen or so times.
Conclusion
The game gets very old very fast. The game has aesthetics, but without better mechanics and more variety of gameplay, I would only want to play in order to unlock items and create my own islands. However, I spend more time unlocking items I don’t want than I do having fun. I only got a few things I liked, and so when I went to build an island, I didn’t have enough to build something complex. The only way to fix this is to play more of the stages, and the payoff just wasn’t worth the time. If anyone, artists and casual gamers might like it, but it wasn’t for me. If it does sound interesting to you, it’s only $3.99, so it’s not too expensive. Otherwise, save your money. If you like my work, check out my articles here.
