Island Force
by Aethyna
Oct 10, 2017 |
1
Votes |
2
Played |
0
Reviews
7
rate
Genres:
Strategy , MMOGraphics:
3DLabels:
War , Real Time , Building , Player vs Player (PvP) , TanksPlatforms:
Publishers:
Studio Hoppe Develop your own base, amass an army, and set off to conquer other players’ bases in this new generation of idle-styled MMORTS, Island Force! Do you have what it takes to work with your fellow allies to dominate the map? Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Island Force is the new generation of idle-styled real-time strategy game that you can play directly from your browser. With a gameplay that is very similar to Astro Conquest, you’ll need to build up an army and attack enemy bases just so you can capture them and expand your influence and your alliance’s dominance on the map. However, like the latter, the game can be rather slow-paced and thus, it might be more of a game that you play on the side while doing something else. Sounds like fun? Well, do read on and find out more about our review of Island Force!
Gameplay
Similar to “Astro Conquest”, Island Force starts the game off with an interactive tutorial mission where you’ll be taught the basics of how to generate resources, build a base, order around your army battalions and attack as well as capture an enemy base. However, you should know that being a tutorial, many of the game’s actual processes have been greatly sped up so you mustn’t be fooled by the steady pace of the tutorial. Oh and also, as opposed to building 20 Light Tanks as requested, you actually need to build 21 tanks to trigger the next part of the tutorial.
Now, unlike most MMO strategy games you may have played on your browser, Island Force is quite different. Instead of having to build your own base up from scratch, the base you’ll start with will already have all the necessary buildings, along with the basic defenses, you’ll need. All you have to do now is to upgrade these buildings just so you can produce more resources within a shorter period of time.
Resource production is where you can see the stark difference between the tutorial and the actual gameplay. In the game itself, you’ll quickly notice that you get very little resources per cycle and you actually have to manually click on the building and on the rectangle-like symbol after every cycle in order to get it to produce even more resources for you. Thankfully though, by upgrading said building, you can bump up – ever so slightly – the amount of resources, be it carbon, metal, cement or oil, that you get. You only have one upgrade slot and one resource production slot at any time.
In addition to its manual resource production, it’s obvious, from the game design, that this game is intended to be played like an idle clicker game without any automation. You’ll find yourself clicking every minute or so just to get your buildings to produce the resources you need to then upgrade your buildings or to construct your military units. The combination of a much slower pace in a time-demanding gameplay can be pretty maddening though.
Due to this, the game offers longer resource production periods of 1 hour and 15 hours in exchange for the game’s premium currency, Titanium. Naturally, most free-to-play player will just have to grit their teeth and content themselves with the grind but if you do manage to get 50,000 Fuel (special resource), you can exchange them for 1 Titanium for free – that’s the only way you can get free Titanium by the way.
If you manage to accumulate a healthy stock of them, Titanium can also be used to purchase a variety of other advantages, such as special structures that are recoverable if you lose your base, like Command Bases, Communication Centrals, Power Plants, Base Extensions, Base Defense Armor, and Advanced Base Defense Missiles which will boost your base’s defenses considerably, making potential invaders think twice and maybe thrice about attacking you.
You can even buy a ton of resources that will be credited into your base’s account immediately using Titanium or transfer resources from one map to another should you decide to start afresh on a new map. In some way, I’d say the game is leaning rather heavily towards pay-to-win.
That said, Island Force scored some bonus points for providing a very nice variety of units that you can build. Most of them are vehicles – tanks, bikes and the like – and they are grouped together, if they are of the same type, into battalions automatically whenever a new unit is rolled out. However, these units require a ton of resources to build. Of course, there will also be a waiting time and you’ll only have that 1 slot to recruit a unit. All of these restrictions and requirements make every unit you lose to a failed attack or an ambush so much more painful to bear.
Community
Interestingly, Island Force automatically drops you into a random alliance once you’ve “graduated” from its tutorial with flying colors, making this game more of a team-based game than not. Your allies are helpfully marked out in blue on the map and you can also chat with them by using the chatting system so you can help each other by coordinating your attacks. Enemies are marked using red (human player-owned bases) and black or orange (AI-controlled bases).
Graphics/ Sound
One of the most incredible features in this game is the superb graphics. Despite being a browser game, Island Force has some really nice tropical-themed visuals that seem procedurally generated mainly because it’s rather odd to see sand so far in-land as opposed to the coastal regions.
Having a base along the coastline is the best of course – you’ll not only get an extra building, a dock, which doesn’t really do anything I think; but you’ll also get to enjoy the wonderfully calming sound of waves rolling into the beach. Granted that the sound is looped rather poorly – you can hear where the clip ends and where the repeat begins – it is still a pretty nice sound to listen to.
Conclusion
All in all, Island Force is an MMORTS game that is basically the same, in every aspect of its gameplay, to Astro Conquest (also by the same company), except that this game has a much different theme and setting. In some way, this “reskinning technique” reminds me of the old Plarium games where they basically just change the graphics, the setting, the theme, the soundtracks and the texts of the game while keeping the gameplay intact. It’s not a really good way to produce new games but I guess, anything goes when you’re desperate enough.
It would have been nicer if they work on improving their old Astro Conquest game first before trying to the reskin though since Island Force still has all the frustrating problems that I’ve encountered in Astro Conquest.
Island Force Blog
New Game Added: Island Force
by Aethyna
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