Islanders

I believe there is a category of media, games included, that receive high ratings not because they're really good, but because there's little to dislike about them. This is probably yet another of the many flaws of rating systems. As a player, you don't want to find a game you don't dislike, you want a game that you really like. And there is no reason that a game with middling reviews couldn't be fantastic for you, personally. A system that could identify something like this is of course signifcantly more complicated and would need to at least take into account the overall preferences of every person rating things. I don't think it's particularly viable, and there's easier improvements most places could make to their rating systems.

Apologies for the long and not-so-relevent intro to my Islanders review. It's just that I don't have much to say about it. As you may have guessed, Islanders is a very highly rated game. It took me but an hour to basically see all the content though, and even then, it wasn't all that interesting.

In Islanders, you're given a series of buildings to place on generated islands. These buildings have certain placement limitations, and give (or deduct) points depending on buildings (or some natural objects) near them. Eventually an island gets full enough that you have a hard time getting enough points for the next milestone, and you move on to the next island where you repeat the same process all over.
The game isn't particularly difficult. There isn't a large variety of buildings, maybe a couple dozen, and building placement strategy is rather shallow. Two of the major flaws I noticed were that you were eventually better off just hovering over various areas to see which gives the most points, or trying to see if a building fit into some crevice that would give a lot of points. There will quickly be too many buildings where reasoning about a good location is too slow, and just randomly scanning the area, letting the computer tell you what's good and what's bad, is the efficient solution. Secondly, that buildings only care about buildings that exist around them when they are first built, meaning you can, for example, replace all the trees near a sawmill with buildings, and you still get to keep your points. This feels really wrong, because placing two farms near a windmill is not the same as placing a windmill near two farms, even though the end result looks to be the same.

Overall, I'm probably the wrong demographic. This is no strategy game, it's a casual "puzzle" game with somewhat aesthetically pleasing buildings and islands. It's one of those "relaxation" games which I just don't understand. If you want to make little island cities like in the screenshots, maybe you'll like it. Otherwise, I have no reason to recommend it.