I loved pretending I knew what I was doing playing 1 - 5 of the original series, making accounts on WildTangent Games to use their free game tokens. Bored one day, years ago, I saw this was on the Xbox store for free and promptly downloaded it to see if it'd give me a nostalgic feeling. Nah, I couldn't operate any of the controls. I tried pressing anything, and there was no way to pick up villagers it seemed. The Island also looked underwhelming, reminding me somewhat of Virtual Villagers: The Lost Children. As I write this review I now find out there's microtransactions; at least in the PC version?! Insane, would love to see a new release from the company but not if it's going to be anything like this game.

I've got just under 2 hours in, and I can at least say I like the direction that this game is going. Street building reminds me of Frostpunk, there's Civ-style diplomatic discussions with other lords, music never became repetitive, the game is optimized enough for me to at times hit 100fps while playing on "ultra settings". I haven't gotten around to combat yet since I flubbed up and barely have a population, but with the bandit camp set to attack in less than a year, I'll definitely have to change that if I want my silly little village to survive. Game is good enough in preview form for me to consider going on Steam to purchase the Early Access while on sale, to support development...Hard to argue with day one access with PC Gamepass though lmao