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The Island - Castaway HD
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Graphics & Sound:
The Island - Castaway HD is an interesting new offering from G5 Games that takes place on a "deserted" tropical island. You play as Tom, a member of a group of castaways whose ship has crashed onto a seemingly pleasant tropical island. Together, you must do what you can to survive, all the while trying to find a way off the island.
The graphics are pleasant enough, with nice little touches like scurrying crabs when you approach the shoreline and slithering snakes when you skirt the swamp area. During your travels across the island, you'll explore beaches, mountains, forests, caves, a swamp and both a deserted and an inhabited tribal village. While nothing is incredibly detailed, everything looks good and is easily discernible, with puddles of water in caves, broken huts in the abandoned tribal village, and even scattered wood pieces around the woodworking area you'll eventually build. Fruit trees abound on the island and it's always easy to tell exactly what type of fruit you are picking up, although a little later, as you plant vegetables, those can be a bit trickier in appearance.
The appearances of the characters in both your castaway group and the tribe you interact with on the island all look fairly good, except Amy, one of the women in your group, has a very old fashioned hairstyle. The voicework is done pretty well, although a little bit overdone. Stefi's voice was particularly grating as she was clearly an adult trying to do the voice for a child, and I suspect the same person did the voice of Phato, a young male member of the tribe. However, sound effects like the grunting of the wild boars and Tom's straining sound when he is pushing himself across the river on a raft all sound good.
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Gameplay:
In The Island - Castaway HD, you play as Tom, a member of a group of survivors from an ill-fated cruise ship caught in a terrible storm. As you all find yourselves on a tropical island, the most important task at hand is survival. Tom seems like a nice, normal guy, but some of the other folks are doozies. There's Nick, a somewhat unstable man wearing a sailor's uniform who is a bit of a know-it-all, especially when it comes to cooking. There's also Mike, a Native American who becomes the de facto leader of the group. Nicole gets elected to do most of the cooking and is also a possible love interest for Tom, while John is an expert in all things ancient and tribal. His voice and appearance reminded me a bit of Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters and he is clearly "the nerd" of the group. Finally, there is Amy and her daughter, Stefi.
You will be given many tasks during your time on the island and these will appear at the bottom of the HUD. They can include anything as simple as gathering wood for a fire or something as strenuous as building a shed to house collected vegetables. As things progress, you'll learn recipes from Nick and the tribe members which you'll be able to prepare by the fire. You can also eat fruits you find along the way to keep your health up, as it depletes with all of the running around the very large island. You can also be injured by snakes and wild boars, some of the dangers on the island, and these will deplete your health as well. If your health gets too low and you don't quickly eat some food to bring it back up, getting attacked by a pursuing boar will finish you off and you'll end up back at the base camp, having lost some of your collected items.
Eventually, you'll learn how to catch fish, trap crabs, and kill boars and snakes for their meat. You'll also learn how to plant seeds and grow vegetables to use in recipes. Once you meet the members of the native tribe, they will also start to give you tasks to complete, in exchange for assistance leaving the island. You'll realize that the island is cursed, having been disturbed by white men many years before, so your task to survive and get off the island won't be an easy one. |
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Difficulty:
There is no adjustable difficulty in The Island - Castaway HD, and that being said, the difficulty level is just perfect. The Island - Castaway HD is a casual game, so you want things to flow, nice and easy, and that's what you'll get. Now, that's not to say that you won't have any challenges while playing, because you will. Fruit lying around is fairly plentiful and if you leave an area and return to it, you'll find more fruit on the ground where you had previously picked it up. Once you acquire the ability to trap crabs and catch fish, you'll have an endless supply of foods you can eat, as long as you have the needed items to cook them.
While most of the game simply consists of fetch quests, there will be times when you'll have to explore dark and dank caves with your torch. One difficult task late in the game is gathering all of the golden statues hidden across the island and, although I had been doing this along the way anyway, there were two of them that were well hidden in tricky spots. |
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Game Mechanics:
For the most part, you'll be tapping the touchscreen for all of your controls in The Island - Castaway HD. You'll tap where you want Tom to run; tap in order to pick up fruit, kindling or logs; tap on a crab to launch your net; tap in deep water to cast your line, then tap it again to reel your fish in; and you'll even tap to launch deadly arrows at snakes and wild boars.
When you want to prepare a recipe, you'll approach the campfire and open your Recipe tab denoted by a chef's hat. This will list all of the recipes you collect on your journey, whether from Nick, another camp member or a tribe member. If you have the needed ingredients, they'll be noted in green, but if you lack ingredients, they'll be noted in red. It's a good idea to pick up everything you can, at least once you purchase an upgrade and get a larger Inventory Bag, because you never know when you might need it for a future quest and it's ever so nice to have what you need at your fingertips when needed.
Initially, the island map will be shrouded in clouds, but as you make your way across the island, you reveal different parts of it on the map. You'll notice that the campfires at your base camp and the tribal village are noted as a flame on the map. People you can interact with will be noted on the map as stars, either red if you are in an active and incomplete quest, green if you have what you need to fulfill the quest but must return to them, blue if they are just in that area but no quest is ongoing with them, and yellow if you have partially fulfilled the quest. What's great about this is that you can tap on a green, red or yellow star and Tom will begin making his way over there without you having to continuously tap to get him there. It's sort of a shortcut and Tom will always take the most direct route. However, be careful, because if his health gets too low and he bumps a wild boar, they may give chase and hurt him. If he runs through snakes, they will also cause him damage, so be sure you are using a protective potion so that you have enough health that it doesn't matter.
Lastly, you can earn 15 trophies based on fishing, crabbing, picking fruit or harvesting veggies, killing boar and snakes and so on. Depending on how much you do, you can earn bronze, silver or gold trophies, so it's a nice way to gauge how much you've accomplished.
The Island - Castaway HD is a really fun casual game with an interesting storyline, one that doesn't end when you beat the game. There's a cliffhanger, teasing you with what is hopefully the next installment of The Island - Castaway HD. I, for one, really enjoyed my experience with the game and I can't wait for a sequel. |
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-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins |
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