SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest

Game review

Once again we come to the Sim* world, which was created by the company Maxis. Originally it was intended that there will be 2 sim games about nature in 1995 - one will be about living on the island and the second will deal with the issues of rainforest. The Maxis decided to merge these two game into one - SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest. SimIsle is a little different from the other sim games. While in previous games there was no specified goal to achieve, it was all about building and expansion, SimIsle is changing this view.

You can choose of 25 islands and each island has a different difficulty and a different objective that must be met. On one island, you must save Animal in danger, other island should be transformed into a prosperous island, then you have to preserve unspoiled nature, but also attract more tourists. As always, you have the large amount of data, charts, graphs, which will help you through the game (also interfere with gameplay).

The player chooses one of several dozen fictional tropical archipelago islands of various shapes and sizes to simulate. The islands have varying amounts of open plains, forests, mountains, natural resources, and native peoples. The amount of pre-developed land also varies but most of the islands are largely nondeveloped when a new simulation begins. Each scenario has objectives and win/lose conditions. Each map can be started with the scenario objectives turned on or off, and the simulation can continue in free form after successfully completing the initial task.

SimIsle has its own currency, known as the EMU, or Ecological Monetary Unit. Each island has varying deposits of natural resources such as lumber, coal, gold, iron, and oil which can be gathered by building an appropriate facility (such as a mine, logging camp, or oil rig) on a tile which contains the resource. Once the facility is built, it operates more or less autonomously and will produce the specified resource at a rate determined by various factors including the richness of the deposit in that area.

Food and unskilled labor are supplied by the native villages dotted across each island. Initially, the native villages have low populations and are only capable of producing enough food to support the lone settlement. Agents with the appropriate skills can be sent to the villages to train them, which increases their ability to produce food. This in turn allows the village population to increase. The additional villagers can then be used to found new villages or act as an unskilled labor pool. The surplus food produced can be used to support populations in towns and cities (which are built by the player) which can then be used to obtain skilled labor. The native population has a happiness level that can be adversely affected by environmental conditions or by drawing too many unskilled laborers. Unhappy villages will sometimes start growing narcotics, which can be exploited for profit using an agent with the Criminal Contacts skill.

To me, SimIsle is one the worst games in the sim* series. Even there is a good idea about preserving the nature, the game is often tedious and uninteresting. You can't build and empire here, you can't even have the megalomaniacal ambitions we used to love in other games (like in SimCity, SimEarth and others). The game, however, provide pleasant rest for the long evenings when if you want to get a good feeling about taking care of nature, at least you can do it in the world of computer games.