Overview
These Doomed Isles identifies as a roguelike city-building deck builder, but I don’t quite agree with it. These Doomed Isles isn’t much of a city builder at all. The buildings you place and the lives of your little citizens mostly boil down to boosting or altering numbers that bear very little resemblance to running any kind of city or village. There’s no simulation going on under the hood.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
The game is, however, a puzzle-like deck builder through and through. Your cards just happen to be things like houses and fishing docks. What These Doomed Isles does manage to do, is use the concept of city building as a great backdrop to support its card-playing mechanisms.
You have to manage resources like food, wood, and stone, and keep your citizens happy while fighting off raids from enemy forces. You do this while taking on the role of 1 of 4 Mythical Gods, and each one has a separate culture, differing mechanics, cards, and powers.
The city builder backdrop makes for a unique kind of deck-building game that stands out from the many Slay the Spire clones that exist, making for an interestingly novel experience.
| Gideon’s Bias | These Doomed Isles Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: Yes | Publisher: Fireshine Games |
| Hours Played: 18+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PC | Platforms: PC |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Rogue-Lite Deck Builder |
| Mode Played: Normal & Hard | Price: $14.99 |
Identity Problems
My first few hours in These Doomed Isles left me confused about the type of game it was. I started with the campaign as I assumed that was the game’s main mode. These Doomed Isles advertised rogue-lite elements, but the campaign consisted of preset missions with special modifiers, objectives, and restrictions…almost…like a challenge mode.
The actual Challenge Mode is the run-based mode I was looking for, where you can customize your starting deck and unlock new cards with points you earn from previous runs. It turns out, that the campaign mode was more of a tutorial, but you do need to play it to unlock all the Gods.
In addition to a variety of difficulty settings, you can also enable a bunch of modifiers to increase the challenge and earn yourself extra MC in the process. MC is the currency used to unlock new cards and boons. Challenge mode feels like the game’s main mode, and presents you with randomized objectives that you need to complete before a certain year.
Once the objectives are complete, you will face off with a boss, and if you defeat it, you win the run. It’s a pretty neat setup. Every run only lasts an hour or two, but they provide a unique kind of puzzle to solve, largely because your biggest enemy in the game, is yourself.
Carding Civilizations
These Doomed Isles is a self-efficiency puzzle. At the start of a new challenge run you will be presented with three objectives. They can range from things like building 4 wonders, stockpiling 200 stone, or having 70 cards in your deck. The trick is, the only thing really stopping you from accomplishing these objectives is..well..you.
You do have to defend from raids, but at its core, These Doomed Isles is a numbers game, and you control the numbers. Every turn you gain a certain amount of faith based on your citizens and structures. Citizens eat a set amount of food, happiness decreases a set amount, etc.
During the harvest, you buy new cards and each new year you attract a couple of new citizens, assuming the current ones are happy, housed, and fed. The cards you can buy are randomized, but very much in a controlled sense. For example, you can spend faith to redraw your hand, and you can do that as many times as you want as long as you have the faith to spend.
The same is true when buying cards, you can reroll your choices by spending gold, and as many times as you can afford. Furthermore, for new cards to enter the pool of things that can be purchased, your citizens have to research them. Whenever this happens, you are presented with three cards that CAN be added to the pool, but don’t have to be. You choose which ones become available for your run.
The buildings you place have static effects, and you choose which buildings citizens should work. For example, a Forester might provide 2 food and 4 wood per worker, but destroy a nearby tree each turn. The point is, that these numbers aren’t arbitrary.
Outside of raids, which I’ll talk about more later, there’s nothing affecting your resource numbers, other than you, and the increasing needs of your population, which again, are somewhat static. Each new citizen needs a home, and job, and contributes a set amount of unhappiness each turn that they don’t have those things, and they eat a set amount of food.
Where most deck builders put an obstacle in front of you and you have to figure out how to overcome it. These Doomed Isles gives you goals and tells you to figure out how to complete them. It’s very open-ended, and you can approach them in many ways. But ultimately your failures boil down to a mathematical miscalculation, at least behind the scenes.
At the same time, there are numerous ways to combo certain structures and actions together, both in your card play and the actual placement of your buildings. You have to figure out what to prioritize.
For example, for a couple of runs, I opted not to start with any food-related building cards in my initial deck. Instead, I opted to boost the population quickly and cover food needs using a Miracle Harvest Card, which let me generate food based on the population living in a specific portion of land where I cast the card.
I used that specific card to cover my food needs temporarily until I researched and bought food-generating building cards. That allowed me to set myself stronger in other ways during the early game, and that’s just a simple strategy and one of many possibilities you have at your fingertips.
The self-efficiency puzzle is an interesting take on the deck-building genre and it’s a satisfying one to solve. The downside is, that it is solvable at times, but two things help keep the game fresh, raids, and the varying cultures.
Culture Shock
You can play as one of four Gods in These Doomed Isles, and each one has its own culture mechanics that greatly affect the gameplay. You have Cernunnos and the ancient Celtic Culture. Cernunnos can be considered the default, or vanilla version of the game from which each other culture alters the mechanics.
Plutus of the Ancient Greeks introduces separate levels of upgradable housing, taxation, the power of statues, as well as festivals and mercenaries.
Acan of The Mayans brings temples that empower ritual sacrifice, as well as workers that don’t destroy the environment around them to generate resources and have special trade cards.
Inari of Ancient Japan brings castles, a rice tax as well as cards that vary in strength between seasons, and awesome samurai.
While some cards cross over between cultures, most of their cards are unique to them and greatly change how you play. The same strategy between two cultures has to be approached very differently. Many strategies are also completely unique to a given culture.
For example, the Greeks have statues of their Gods, each one with unique effects, and there are festival cards that retrigger those powers. You can play entire games using these statues for the vast majority of your resources. If you do it strategically at least.
Each culture does a really neat job of taking the game’s basic deck-building mechanics, and twisting them in unique and interesting ways. It makes each faction feel really novel, without having to relearn the entire game whenever you play a new one.
Colonizer Calamities
Raids periodically appear throughout a run. Raids are made up of mythical creatures, rival powers, and historically accurate colonizers, such as the Conquistadors if you’re playing as the Mayans. Every turn they will attempt to destroy your buildings, and eventually your shrine, leading to a game over.
To fend off these raids, you have access to defense cards that vary by culture. These cards can be defensive structures such as walls and towers, units, and even God Powers such as hailstorms or lightning. Your ability to actually defend your village is something you must always keep in mind when researching and drafting new cards.
Furthermore, the fact that raids exist helps keep the efficiency puzzle from becoming too solvable, since you have to dedicate resources to your defenses, and losing buildings can really throw a wrench in your plans.
That said, it’s not always the most interesting aspect of the game. While the campaign features a lot of unique enemy types, the challenge mode really doesn’t. The biggest difference between most enemies, is simply what buildings they choose to target first, and that’s a bummer when the campaign had enemies such as the Kelpie that would sink entire sections of your island.
The act of dealing with enemies is also..extremely unbalanced depending on your culture. For example, I almost never found myself actually using units to defend my island. The God powers were just far too easy to make brokenly strong. The Meteor spell, for example, is very easily buffed to insane degrees by buffing them with certain structures.
Units are more expensive and require a larger investment to get to anywhere near the same level of power. I’m never naive enough to expect perfect balance in a deck builder, but I wish a few options weren’t glaringly the superior choice as that does impact your strategic creativity.
Verdict
These Doomed Isles is a refreshing unique spin on the deck builder genre, one that gives you an efficiency puzzle to try and solve without tripping yourself up, while also fending off the occasional raid. The game also gives you plenty of ways to play it with several modes and modifiers, a lengthy campaign, rogue-lite run-focused challenge mode, endless horde mode, and creative sandbox.
Four different cultures provide a ton of gameplay variety with an equally varied amount of potential strategies and combos you could pull off.
That said, the enemy variety in challenge mode is disappointing, the balance is completely off when it comes to God Powers, and honestly, if you are interested in the rogue-lite run-focused challenge mode like I was. I gotta say, progression is extremely slow unless you play with a bunch of modifiers to increase the amount of MC you earn.
These Doomed Isles is, however, a charming and highly replayable novel deck-building experience that you can get for a pretty inexpensive price. It may not have Godlike perfection, but it’s still a pretty fun game nonetheless.
