The popular city-building strategy game Islanders from 2019 just got a follow-up: Islanders: New Shores launched this week on Steam, featuring new scoring methods, plenty of new environments and lots of pretty visual options.
The series has maintained its focus on charming, aesthetically pleasing civilization-building at a relaxed pace, set to calm and pleasant music. It's very much a take-your-time-and-plan kind of high-score game, rather than any kind of real-time strategy. Here's the new launch trailer for New Shores:
You'll start a game of Islanders establishing a new town in one of a number of colorful biomes, and then choose from among building types to populate it with, each functioning and scoring via different criteria. A lumberjack camp, for example, wants to be near big forests of trees. Combining with these are larger scenario scoring goals which will allow you to travel to new islands and start bigger cities once you reach them. The resulting settlements that arise as you fit multitudes of different building types together are quite gorgeous to look at, and often have a surprisingly organic feel to their layouts.
It looks like the new sequel is a very faithful follow-up: it features new biomes and color palette options, lots of new buildings and strategy elements, a whole new soundtrack, a photo-filter mode and some new one-time-use powers called Boons, but it's definitely not reinventing the formula. Which could be a big positive if you enjoyed the simple gameplay loop of the original.
One of the closest points of comparison that comes to mind for me when trying to describe how Islanders plays, and describe its appeal, is another boardgame-y strategy game of placing down geographical features to slowly build out a map: Dorfromantik. Right down to the "calm" vibes and music and the minimal interfaces, the games have a whole lot in common. Placing one hex at a time to complete scoring goals in Dorf has always been very moreish, and Islanders feels much the same way.
You can get Islanders: New Shores on Steam now, where it's got a 10% launch discount running until July 24th, and a free demo if you'd like to try it out before you buy. The original Islanders is also very cheap during this window, a 60% off sale making it an easy recommendation if you're in the mood for something chill.
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