App Army Assemble: Spirit of the Island - "Should you pay this life sim a visit?"

• This week, our App Army played Spirit of the Island
• It's cartoony look impressed our readers
• But the speed it drained their device's batteries did not

Spirit of the Island is the latest release from the prolific Plug in Digital. It sees you traversing 14 different islands to learn all about their flora, fauna, inhabitants and history. Our App Army community are all intrepid explorers, so we handed the game over to them to see what they thought.

Here's what they said:

Overall, the story is quite good and explanatory of what the player’s mission is. However, it’s dragged out when every villager is constantly talking about it.
A big issue in this game is that some NPCs such as Tala, talk way too much about irrelevant things. The tutorials aren’t interesting, fun or useful whatsoever, which makes the game boring when it just started.

The inventory management needs to be fixed due to the fact that I had to throw everything out and pick it up in a specific order to use items. The graphics are excellent and fitting for a game like this. However, there are already games with similar mechanics, that are far more interesting and fun.

Spirit of the Island is an RPG in a similar style to Stardew Valley. Playing the story mode, your protagonist (who can be male or female) washes up on an Island with no memory but their name. The island is run down and as you explore and collect stuff you can craft items that will solve goals that open up the island.

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Eventually, you will attract tourists to the island, some will stay and can be hired to help on your farm. The graphics are cartoonish but do the job. It’s a fun game but not a good mobile game. It kills my phone battery, the UI is cluttered and the gameplay feels overwhelming at the start. The game is big, with 14 islands in all, and really needs to be played in long sessions. A quick pick-up and play game this is not. Such a pity there is not a version for the AppleTV, as paired with a controller this would play well on a TV and not have to worry about running out of battery power.

Spirit of the Island is a life simulation/adventure game similar to Stardew Valley in which you start off making a character, the thing that threw me off is that right away there are 2 options to start the game with (there wasn't a description: story mode and pretty much a non-story mode there isn't much of a difference other than the story). The touch controls worked well (even though they recommend a controller) the music/fx were complimentary and worked with the game.

The graphics looked good. Pros: there are a lot of things to explore/do, and plenty of re-playability. Cons: it could use some sort of cloud save in order to play between devices, the game feels overwhelming at the start, plus the game really exhausts my battery after an hour of play. I feel like there's some polish that could be added but really of all this could be fixed in future updates. I feel like you get a lot for the price and if you're a fan of the life/farm sim this will be an enjoyable adventure.

SOTI is a super well-made adventure game, from its exploration, Graphics, and controls, especially when playing with a gamepad. The game has a survival handle with a very colourful and super well-done graphic style.

In the game you fight, build, look for resources, and take care of your health, it reminds a little of Minecraft in its exploration. This is a game that is very worth buying, it is guaranteed fun if you like games with great exploration, mainly because its map is very large and exploring it is super rewarding and fun. We can build several tools such as swords, axes, pickaxes and much more and all of them are necessary for your survival

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Spirit of the Island