ISLANDERS VR Edition

Design is thoughtful and so calming. You’re chasing a score but leveling up on your terms. The environment immerses you so well that you feel excited when your town unlocks a tavern, even though there’s no people

Tutorial is easy to understand. Can play without controllers but I recommend using them. It's a pretty endless city builder/puzzle. You can min max for points or just chill and place buildings. 10/10

I've loved this game ever since I first discovered the (non VR) version several years back. Simple and elegant, easy to learn but difficult to master. Perfect fit for VR and MR. I genuinely hope the developers continue to do more things with it.

I love finally being able to zoom in on my little cities, and I imagine there are always little extra details the developers could add at the smaller scales, like little townsfolk walking around. That said, I don't expect them to add anything like that, as the game does achieve pretty much what they set out to do, and is more about the strategy and simplicity than unnecessary detail.

I love this game. I’ve drained my Quest battery two days in a row playing it. And about 5 hours in, I'm done, totally satisfied, ready to move on. It’s a city builder, but incredibly simple. Probably simpler even than Little Cities. There’s no time pressure, no demand, no infrastructure, no traffic, nothing bad ever happens (probably ‘cause there’s also no people). I sit on the floor and play it like I’m eight years old again. It's so clean and uncomplicated that even calling it a city builder might be too much. How about "building placer"?

For anybody who needs a tutorial, here you go: Grip the world and drag it to move around. Turn your palm towards the ceiling to show a building menu. Some buildings like certain buildings, and they hate other buildings. Put them near the buildings they like, and far away from the ones they don’t like, and you’ll get points. Those points will unlock more buildings. Keep going and you’ll unlock other islands to go to, where you’ll also put buildings. That’s it.

To the developer, there are a couple of changes I think would be good.1) The selection ray extends from the wrist, which feels really odd, took me a while to get used to that. Perhaps it should extend from your index finger or from the center of the hand, instead of like I’m Spiderman shooting web. 2) The building menu is often occluded by the hand models, like the hands are transparent but you can't see the menu through them.

And if you love me, hand tracking so I can pick up a building with thumb and forefinger and place it down would be beautiful. 👌

This game is just not very good in the first place because most of the controls don’t work like it takes me ten tries to delete then I have more stuff to delete. This game has good potential it just needs more effort put into it ya know

Coming from Xbox version I had ZERO problems with controls, the tutorial or understanding the game. It’s about a chilled construction of a city, not Civilization.
But yes, there are bugs. I’m annoyed by losing a selected building just after zooming in or out to find a better spot for it. Night / day transition is a bit abrupt. And yea, there could be a bit more sounds and live to it since we can immerse into it now (sounds of the wind mill or shaman chanting when you get closer to it?). And oh… placing Plateau is pain.
But these are small annoyances or the overall great zen game.