Paradise Island: Run away from reality and escape to your own special island resort!
Ever feel like you’re in need of a holiday?… but you’re months away from your actual flight?… Well don’t worry – you can have some respite on your very own Paradise Island! We’ve always seen Paradise Island as one of the top games and we were curious what it was because it seemed like a Sim City 2000/Theme Park kind of game… Check out what we thought of the game below…
Gameplay: No… this isn’t an epic SimCity or Theme Hospital type game. Actually, Paradise Island is very much like a Facebook Farmville game, but the theming is a getaway resort. In case you haven’t seen Farmville before, here’s a brief overview of Paradise Island:
You have your very own desert island, and you decorate it with buildings to create an urban jungle. Each of the different buildings will earn you money after a specific period of time. Generally you can split the buildings into short (<1 hour), medium (<6 hours) and long cycle (~12 hours) categories – i.e. they have different capacities and they accumulate different amounts of cash. You must return to the game at the right time in order to manually click on the dollar signs to collect your profits. By erecting buildings and collecting cash, you slowly accumulate experience points. This slowly levels you up and thus unlocks more beautiful and extravagant building designs.
This is one of those freemium games where there’s a dual currency system with dollars, and ‘piastes’ which can both be purchased using real cash. But don’t worry, you don’t have to buy anything, as we will explain in our game tips below.
The Good Parts: The graphics here are pretty, and the music/sound effects seems spot on. Layout of the buttons is generally ok, and although the menu system is indepth, it only takes a few times of navigation to understand the different options. Probably the best part of this game is the interactiveness with the seasonal content – for example, during Halloween there were zombies and vampires walking around which you had to fireball in order to collect special tokens (the tokens could be used to purchase for special buildings).
The Bad: Like FarmVille, this brews down to a heavy numbers game – now don’t get me wrong, I think they can be fun every now and then, but there doesn’t seem to be much real strategy involved here. What the building is, and what it looks like is irrelevant – only the numbers and the money they collect per hour is important. To make things a bit dumber, the rough rule of thumb is that the more expensive the building costs, then the more money it’ll bring in (one need only check the cycle time). The only real balancing act is the staff and electricity – but there’s no difficulty here.
Rating: 4/5 This is a fun game where you can nurture your own romantic island and it’s an excellent way of killing time every day. After you’ve landscaped a beautiful masterpiece then you can share your island with your friends on Facebook. Ignoring our negative views above, the loss of some stars are due to the poor touch interface – it takes a fair bit of time to get used to how to interact with the game efficiently. But hey, the game is totally free and you don’t have to fork out a cent for any of the buildings – check out our tips below to find out how.
Paradise Island Promotional Youtube Video
Paradise Island Tips from Android Games Review
- When you start off initially, play through the game for a couple of days pressing all the functions and expect to restart from scratch afterwards. You need to get used to where everything is, and understand where piastes are used. It’s very easy to accidentally use piastes up.
- Think very unlogical and forget about people’s hunger or thirst needs… infact forget about people! – they’re generally unimportant. Even the paths are a waste of space you only need them when you’re laying down your building. After your building is in place, you can delete the paths – that way you can compress the buildings really close together.
- You only need to leave just enough path space for you to see vampires or ghouls during the seasonal sessions when you’re trying to collect Halloween tokens.
- Try and identify what type of gamer you are: Do you think you can come back once an hour, or do you think you’ll only come back once a day? If you’re hungry to get ahead, you should find that the short cycle buildings can get you a fair amount of cash in a short space of time.
- If however, you think you’ll only come back once a day, then focus on the long term buildings to maximise efficiency. Each of the objects will cap out in the cash they hold, so you only want a few short term buildings for enjoying the game every now and then.
- Until you’ve run out of space, you should continue to construct new buildings than to upgrade existing ones (unless you’re leaving space to try and achieve a particular achievement).
- Forget about buying anything that needs piastes until you’ve built a business center or banks.
- Although foliage gives the impression that your island is pretty, it turns out that it’s an enormous pain because you can very easily accidentally select it. So build some to get the achievements, but otherwise keep all the trees and flowers well out of the way.
Some Easy Awards and Money Boosts
- You get bonuses for building a certain amount of road (Check out Achievements Specifics below). They’re free to build and destroy, so do long chains across your island every now and then to get these boosts.
- Leave the screen on for 3 hours, then you’ll get $5000. Spend even longer in the game and you can get even more (Check out Achievements Specifics below). Just leave your game on at night to speed up this process.
- Plant 5 flowers (costs $1500), then you’ll get $3000 plus 200 XP.
- Move your buildings 20 times, then you’ll get you $1500 and 50XP, (Check out Achievements Specifics below). Keep moving and you get even more bonus money! It’s free to relocate so keep pressing to get that free cash!
How to get far without buying piastes with real money
- Make sure to build a Business Center and a Bank as soon as possible.
- The Business Center will earn you 1 piastres in 24 hours. If you upgrade it to level 5, you’ll get 1 piaste every 18 hours. Unfortunately, you can only have one Business Center for your island.
- The Bank will give you 2 piastres every 36 hours. Like the a business center, the time to collect the piastres will go down once you upgrade the facility.
Achievements Specifics
Check out this wiki page to determine what you can do to earn more money and XP.
Paradise Island QR Code
Click on the icon or scan the barcode with your Android phone to goto the Android Market
Developers: Game Insight
