Family Island Review – is it worth playing?

Family Island is a town building game by Melsoft Games. In the game, are on a deserted island with your family. The goal is to build up a nice town using the resources found on the island. The game is fairly new, but has enjoyed rapid popularity. At the moment, the game has been downloaded over a million times on Android alone.

But is the game worth playing? In this review we’ll go over the graphics of Family Island, the gameplay and whether or not the game is pay to win. Let’s get into it.

The game play

The premise of Family Island is fairly simple; you collect the resources you find on the island and use them to build up your town. The buildings you create allow you to make more advanced materials, which you will need to build ever more complex structures. You start out on a small section of the island and as you progress you reveal more and more of it.

The game starts out with a tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game. For instance, it teaches you that you can make string by using grass, scrapers from stones and so on. The tutorial does a pretty good job of easing you into the game and understanding what raw materials are used to create items is quite simple to understand. It also gives you a bit of a backstory on the characters and how you ended up on the island.

Whenever you collect resources on the island you expend energy. Your energy can be restored by eating, or of course through the use of rubies.

Overall, while the game play is quite simple, it’s pretty fun to upgrade structures and collect resources. However, there is one problem; the constant need for rubies. We’ll explain more about that in the following section of the review.

Is Family Island Pay to Win?

Family Island is free to play, but there’s a premium currency present in the game called rubies. These rubies can be used to buy resources, instantly finish production times, getting more energy and much more. The rubies are super helpful, but the game really pushes them on you. You can’t even make it through the tutorial without the game asking you if you’d like to spend money on rubies.

Family Island is a single player game, so there’s not really anyone to beat but the game itself. If you want to you can play the game without using rubies, but there will be a lot of waiting involved. The rubies speed up the game a lot more and prevent you from having to sit around and wait for your production to finish up.

Spend 2 rubies or wait 4 minutes. That’s basically what happens every time you try to craft something; you either wait or spend rubies to get it instantly.

This is nothing new in mobile games. Most freemium games nowadays feature a similar system, but Family Island does kind of overdo it. Constantly pushing rubies on the player is quite frustrating. There are some ways in the game to get rubies for free, but they’re quite limited. For instance, you can occasionally find gifts in the jungle but not too often. If you’d like to learn more about getting free rubies, check out this post we wrote about the subject.

The graphics

Family Island has cartoonish, colorful graphics that are quite pleasing to the eye. However, graphics are a highly subjective issue. Some people may hate the graphics while others might like them. Therefore, we’ll share a video with you that we took that showcases the graphics you can expect in Family Island.

In our opinion the graphics are quite good. The objects on the island are pretty well distinguished from one another and the buildings you create are easy to recognize for what they are.

The verdict – worth playing?

If you’re a fan of town building games then Family Island might be for you. The graphics are good and the game play is quite engaging if you’re into this kind of games. The main question is if you’re okay with the pay to win elements that are present in the game. Overall the game is a lot of fun, but if you’re very against buying premium currency (rubies) then Family Island is probably not for you.

You can of course choose to play Family Island without spending any money. But if do choose to do so, you be prepared to do a lot of waiting around. The best way to play the game is you do choose to go free to play is probably by playing it casually. You can simply open the game occasionally, craft what you need and let the timers run while you’re doing something else. For that purpose it’s quite a good game.

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