Simmiland

Simmiland is a god game mixed with a card game. There's the usual island, autonomous humans running around and doing their best (which isn't very good, mind you) to survive, and you blasting the ground with various things like plants, rocks, wildlife, weather, or even some natural disasters. There's a little mixture of exploration through trying out different combinations. For example, sunshine increases temperature, causing grasslands to turn to deserts, but also swamps to tropics. A plant in a desert is a cactus, but in water, a coral. Wildlife on grasslands is a harmless chicken, but wildlife in a tundra is a polar bear that will maul a lot of your people. The tacked on card deck system limits what god powers you can use at a given time.

To mention some of the better parts first, I liked the cheery atmosphere it had. Can't say the music and graphics were much, but they fit well, so that can only be a positive. Trying out the combinations of what does what, how everything interacts, and trying to understand what goes through the minds of my little creatures running around was also pretty nice, but sadly lost its luster quickly, as content dried out. That can be said for the whole game, where I had seen 50% in the first 20 minutes, 75% in an hour, and 90% in about two hours. The rest was going to be repetitive, as nothing was going to go significantly differently in the next playthrough.

I think the worst part (aside from the lack of content) was that you had to guess too much. Sure, exploration was fun at first, but since advancement through the game was almost exclusively through your godly deeds, it got very difficult to guess the right combinations for those last items, mostly devolving into spamming your cards, hoping something would happen. And speaking of spamming, the game was fairly frantic for a "card game". Never mind that the whole card aspect could have been left out without making anything worse, but the most effective way of getting through the first half of the game was to just use all your cards as fast as you could to make all the suitable environments and items for your people. They themselves did relatively little that influenced you back, so really, the interaction with the game was just poor.

I've never been a fan of god games, instead preferring the management types of games. Cutting the AI allows you to make much larger and complex things inside the game, and means the player doesn't have to rely on the AI not acting like an idiot. Even though most management games only allow you to say what needs to be done, and not order your people around directly, it still creates a better interaction with the game, instead of the one-sidedness of god games.
All in all, I enjoyed it for the first hour or so, while it was new, shiny, and showering me with unexpected things. Then it ran out of things to shower me with, and I realized it wasn't all that great. Not recommendable.