![]() The goals in SimIsle are something to work towards, but the real understated mission of the game is to explore the dynamics of development, the interwoven relationships of the environment and labor that enable it, constrain it, and react to it. The SimIsle manual accurately calls the islands “a dense web of complex connection, of eco-interactivity,” and that’s the thrust of the game. Then another iron mine once the first one runs dry. It starts with an iron mine in the mountains then a steel mill then a warehouse a heavy industry plant a city to support the factories a power plant to run the city a university to train the engineers. Whatever you’re pursuing, the footprint of your operation continually grows and gets more complicated to maintain. They may task you with restoring an endangered species or developing a tourist industry while preserving a pristine ecosystem. Some missions don’t care how terribly you treat the island (“just take what you can as quickly as you can”), while other missions expect greater care. Instead, the missions help concentrate you on specific scenarios that expose you to a wide range of environmental conditions and goals. The game takes so many directions that it could easily lack focus without an objective, even by the standards of a Sim game. Your motivations for colonizing the islands vary, but the goal almost always involves extracting some profit from them – whether that’s with tourism, starting a manufacturing industry, or mining their resources and oil. ![]() Each island in the archipelago has a specific task to complete. The island starts crawling with energy as construction begins (look at that little bus!)Īlthough you can play SimIsle as an open-ended sandbox in the style of SimCity or other simulation games, the emphasis of the game is on individual missions. You’ve basically invaded an island, and your actions will leave scars on its ecology and culture.ĭevelopment underway. Everything has a background, and everything comes with a cost – transportation budget for trucks, boats, and planes moving people and supplies maintenance costs for the structures you build and salaries for your staff who keep the development running. In this self-contained setting, you can see how nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re the manager of the development on a rainforest island, somewhere out in a cluster in the Pacific Ocean. And one of the most critical this time is your interaction with the environment. SimIsle, developed for Maxis by the British company Intelligent Games, isn’t simply a new location: it’s also a new set of ideas to experiment with. Not necessarily accurate portrayals of those concepts, but a distillation of them, attempting to be faithful to the spirit of how they interact. They were interactive toys where you could play around in a sandbox with concepts about science or society. What distinguished Maxis’s Sim games was that they weren’t just about making cities or farms. How many SimNoun titles could they release? It would be easy to write off SimIsle: Missions In The Rainforest as “ SimCity on an island.” This was the ninth commercially released Sim game published by Maxis, and by this point, the studio may have looked predictable.
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