Overview
Paradise Tycoon offers a welcome break from daily life, with simpler tasks that mirror island living. Upon finding yourself stranded on a barren island, you're given the opportunity to make it your own. Much like games such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Paradise Tycoon allows for the satisfying completion of straightforward tasks.
Gameplay
At its current stage, snapshot 4 at the time of writing, Paradise Tycoon offers a vast array of options for customizing your island as desired. In addition to the main storyline tasks and quests, you can also pick up rocks, pebbles, trees, and flowers and place them wherever you like. However, the limited inventory system, reminiscent of the old Resident Evil games, can be cumbersome when designing the perfect island. While it makes sense for game items and those used for progression and crafting, it would be ideal to have the ability to pick up all decorative items at once, creating a blank slate on which to create the perfect landscape.
Paradise Tycoon provides the chance to fish, farm, and chop trees, among other activities. Regrettably, most, if not all, of these actions are contextual. You walk over to a tree and press the "do stuff" button, proceeding to complete the task. The experience would be more engaging if you were required to equip the correct tool for the job, which you have to do anyway, and then click the mouse as if you were physically swinging the axe or pounding the hammer. The contextual "do stuff" button is also used for crafting, which can take a rather long time, often taking you out of the game, since you're essentially just watching a timer while your character completes the task.
While it may take some time to complete items within the crafting tree, the progression makes sense. With further explanation, it would be great to see the crafting tree gain complexity and more variety in terms of the creation of items from base resources, as well as different tiers of resources needed to create items, rather than just requiring base resources for most items. This would add another level of strategy to help players decide the most efficient route for production.
The game developers are doing an excellent job expanding the game in each snapshot, not only by adding to the game itself, but also by adding to the available game loops. Most recently, they've even added the chance to become a special agent by completing various platforming challenges, which opened the doors to PvP-style leaderboard competitions.
Review
As a fan of both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, I'm excited to see how Paradise Tycoon progresses. With certain tweaks to the current gameplay and the ongoing addition of further game mechanics, this game will certainly be one to watch for those of us who enjoy the peaceful, relaxing side of gaming and the paradise farming life sims it offers.
