Ever since we saw the famous misadventures of Tom Hanks and Wilson on that desert island, it appears that this film genre has its best days behind it – on the big screen, at least. Every now and then a new movie comes out that involves surviving in unknown environments, but never with quite the same assiduousness. Luckily this baton was picked up by TV shows like Lost as well as video games, where it’s become a terrifically popular genre. Tinker Island is the latest such release – in this case offering a new approach to this almost-stale genre on Android.
Tinker Island brings a breath of fresh air to the survival genre. No more suffering and scraping by to survive – this game, developed by the popular studio Kongregate, gives the subject a rather less dark treatment. Surviving might still be hard, but there’s a certain levity to both the tone and the gameplay, which will keep you glued to your screen without having to be constantly sweating it.
In this game most of your actions are based on dragging your survivors around to do things. This simple gameplay in Tinker Island is as simple as it is relaxing. Need to explore? Just send a couple people from your team and a popup window will tell you how long they’ll spend doing it. Go hunting? Make tools? Drag the characters from your team and wait. Each survivor has four stats that determine how fast they can do these little missions: search, collect, make, and fight. The key in Tinker Island is in knowing how to pick who should do what to make them survive as long as possible.
Besides doing all the stuff needed to survive, the game also has various events and you’ll be advantaged or disadvantaged by them depending on how you respond. This is done similarly to how text adventures work. Everything follows the simplicity sustained by Tinker Island at all times.
That said, it’s not all good news here, as the game does have an annoyance that slightly blights its final effect: the wait times while your characters do their tasks can get super tedious. We’ve seen this in a lot of free-to-play titles and it can destroy an otherwise good gaming experience: if you want to wait less, you have to shell out real money for it. It’s obviously not an obligation, but it can get quite frustrating to wait ages for an action to finish that used to get done in a snap.
With both its bright and dark spots, Tinker Island is still an original take on the survival genre. A title with a lot to offer thanks to how much you can do in it and all the secrets of the island that you can discover. Plus it gets constant updates and has special content on certain dates (Christmas, for instance). A huge game with a couple different online communities to hash out any questions it might bring up: an official forum and a subreddit.
Tinker Island for Android on Uptodown [APK] | Download
