Review written by Eric Pankoke

Buy Spb AirIslands from Clickgamer

A great series of earthquakes ravaged your world and ripped it apart into many tiny islands. Now you must do your part as ruler of one of those islands to help restore your world to its former glory. Air Islands might be described as “Sim City Lite” with resource gathering, but the method in which you collect your building materials in unlike any PocketPC game you've played before. Is Air Islands worth digging an anchor into, or should you just let it float on by? Read on to find out…

Graphics Description:

From the opening screen it's obvious that the graphics are very professional. The interface is laid out nicely, and everything is easy to understand. While the graphics for the various structures are small to facilitate fitting a lot onto a small screen, everything is still detailed, and most structures have some sort of animation. The blades of the windmill turn, smoke rises from the chimneys of the houses, and shadows crawl across the surface of the lakes as clouds pass by. Even cooler are the little bonuses like bugs that flit around the light of the lamps at night. For such a tiny world there's a whole lot of details in the visuals, and that makes for a very compelling atmosphere.

Sound Description:

There is only one song in the main game, but it's so melodic and peaceful that while it may strike you at a given moment that it's quite repetitious, you will soon find that you are humming it in your sleep (anyone remember the theme to Tetris for the Gameboy?) As far as the sounds are concerned, everything from the chirping of crickets at night to the cacophony of farm animals and birds during the day bring this game to life. The bling of earned money and the beep of incoming mail will constantly remind you that your island is progressing, and each type of item being repaired (buildings, tress, lakes) each has it's own corresponding noise. The audio in Air Islands is definitely atmospheric.

Gameplay Description:

Your main objective in Air Islands is to rebuild the Gravitator on your island so that you can reunite your land with the rest of the islands that were formed during the earthquakes. To do this you must build houses to provide the island with some population, various other buildings to provide the people with something to do to earn money, and trees and lakes to keep the population happy and pollution down. The key to success is finding the right combination of structures that will allow you to build your Gravitator in the shortest amount of time.

There are 3 factors that determine when you can build another section onto your Gravitator: Pollution, Economy and Happiness. Every structure affects at least one of these factors. In addition, your structures deteriorate over time, raising pollution and lowering Economy and Happiness. You can repair your structures over time, either individually or as a group, and this is a highly recommended action. Though you may not feel the urge to part with the gold or resources to do the repairs, in the long run you'll find that well cared for structures produce happy and prosperous people.

Any structure costs a certain amount of gold to build, in addition to varying amounts of the three types of resources in the game: water, bricks and wood. However, you will not see a single structure that allows you to generate these resources, nor will you have the ability to set any of your population to the task of gathering these things. So how do you accumulate resources? You play mini-games for them, of course! This is Air Island's most unique selling point, though in a way also it's biggest drawback.

Bubbles is your game of choice if you want to earn water. I know there's an older game that this is based off of, but the most popular current example that comes to mind is Dynomite from Popcap games. If you need bricks you'll play Arkaball II, which is basically a variation of Arkanoid / Breakout. Finally, in order to satisfy that craving for wood you can play Xonix II, a revitalization of that classic game Qix. Of the three my favorite is Xonix II. This isn't because I particularly care for that type of game, but rather because it's the easiest game to quickly accumulate resources on, and the other two mini-games basically bore me.

The basic simulation elements of the game work well on the small screen, but it can take a long time to build up enough money to complete your gravitator. If you can actually stick it out through the first couple of upgrades to your gravitator, you will get hooked on the game and want to see your gravitator completed. If you aren't very patient, however, you will lose interest in this game quickly. You do have the option to “fast forward” the game if you're stocked up on resources and just need to collect some money, but then you often feel like you're missing something. In my opinion it should have been the mini-games that stole the show, but the games themselves weren't all that interesting, and I think “fast paced” is a bit of a misnomer. Unless you play on the hard setting Bubbles is quite tedious, and you can often waste a lot of time trying to destroy the last one or two blocks in a level on Arkaball II. My suggestion with the mini-games is that if you find one you like, play that one as much as you can and use the “trade” option to get the other resources. This will only work to an extent, because the store is limited to the amount of resources it has and only gets refilled every few days, but it eliminates some of the hassle of playing the mini-games you don't like.

The final thing I'd like to mention is not so much about gameplay, but more about SPB Software House's commitment to building a community of Air Islands players. If you sign up for an account and buy a copy of Air Islands, you can actually upload information about your islands as you are playing them. Your current Pollution, Economy and Happiness levels will be uploaded, as well as a screen shot of your island as it was when you last exited the game. Here's my first attempt at an island. I know there are many places that let you upload high scores and mods, but to the best of my knowledge SPB is the first company to take it to this extreme, and I honestly hope others follow suit.

There’s definitely a lot to like about Air Islands. If you can get past the initial ramp-up time of building the island, and you can tolerate at least one of the mini-games so you don’t fall short on resources, this is a PDA strategy game not to be missed. Spb AirIslands receives a score of 9 out of 10.

[Editor's note:  At the time of writing Spb Software is an advertiser on PocketGamer.  Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway!) this had absolutely no bearing on the score given]

Score-by-score breakdown

Gameplay:  70%
Graphics:  100%
Sound:  100%

Overall:  90%

Please note that the overall score is more than simply an average of the individual ratings.  Many thanks to Spb Software for providing our review copy.

You may wish to search for more reviews of games from Spb Software. Alternatively, you can view all the reviews written by Eric Pankoke.