Most members of the testing group found themselves terribly attached to their little villagers. Several times during the test, we were required to uninstall and reinstall the game, and the outcry was substantial. The game can be rather addictive, and you may find yourself popping in every few minutes to see what has changed.

When you earn enough tech points to get a new level in any of your basic tasks, the game changes. It's not always obvious exactly what has changed, which is a good thing, but something new is nearly always available. When you move to level two of harvesting for example, a new potential food source is accessible.

To find out what has changed, you need to drag a villager around the island. At the start of the game, there are many places where they're confused; when new tech levels are purchased, suddenly the confusion ends. Figure C shows one of my villagers, confused by a collection of rocks.

FIGURE C


Villagers will be confused until their tech level is high enough to understand. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The game also contains twelve puzzles. I won't give any of them away, but I will tell you that you're likely to find nine or so just by wandering around the game. Not right away, though. Each of your five basic tasks has tech levels associated with it, and many of the puzzles cannot be solved at the first tech level. Whenever you increase a tech level, it's worthwhile checking into any of the places where your villagers found themselves confused; often something new can be done after a new tech level is purchased.

This takes care of about nine puzzles, so what about the remaining ones? A villager will solve two of them without any intervention on your part, and the third, frankly, is essentially impossible. It requires a completely different approach from the others, several very high tech levels, and serious persistence--and there are no hints in the game as to how to solve the puzzle. I find this particularly frustrating because the game has essentially trained me to play a certain way and this last puzzle does not fit the same pattern.

Overall
Village Sim is a very complex game masquerading as a simple one. The villagers interact with each other in a variety of ways; your choices of how to spend tech points have a huge impact on how the game progresses, and the island events add a degree of randomness, which increases the sense of realism.

The LDW team provides outstanding technical support for the game, and have put a tremendous amount of effort into making Village Sim a solid game. If it weren't for the "puzzle of doom", I'd rate the game a 5; as the game stands now, it deserves a 4.

OUR RATING: 4 of 5

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.