Click the Image to see an enlarged version

A friend recommended the game, Virtual Villagers: A New Home to me. I am always one to play a game that sounds fun. I also love any reality-based games where you control the lives of certain characters. This is partly why I was so interested in playing the game once I knew it existed.

Once I had Virtual Villagers, I was ready to play. The game was developed by Last Day of Work and it has been marketed as a GameHouse Game. According to the Virtual Villager website, Virtual Villagers: A NewHomeis the first chapter in a series of village simulations. This game was developed from the game Village Sim. In essence, Virtual Villagers: A New Home, is Village Sim with extra puzzles and some updated features.

The story for the game starts when you arrive with your villagers on the island of Isola. There are two women, three men, and a boy. You have washed up here after a volcano destroyed your former home. You must help your villagers survive and repopulate on the island.

It seems easy enough, especially when you turn off your computer and go into real time mode. This means your game keeps going while you are asleep, away, etc. If you are going to be away from your computer for a while, it is recommended that you pause your game. This way you have some control over what happens in your village.

Real time mode is the ONLY thing that saved this game for me. If you are impatient (like I tend to be), I highly recommend you consider not purchasing Virtual Villagers. The goal of the game is simple. You must teach your villagers to build, research, heal (as a doctor/healer), reproduce, and farm in order to solve sixteen puzzles.

This sounds simple, but since the game plays in real time it takes what seems like FOREVER to get anywhere in the game. If you put your villagers “preferred” job on research, and one on farming, you will be okay. Some people say they run out of food, but I did not have that problem.

You want to get your girl pregnant as soon as possible and try to get someone building between researching. However, research is the most important thing to get points on if you want to survive. Once you get so many research points you can unlock numerous levels that help you advance as a farmer, builder, parent, spiritually, etc.

Try to avoid having both of your women pregnant. You may have to watch the girls because they may try to start reproducing when you are not looking. However, once a girl has a baby she is pretty much stuck and is unable to help with anything until the baby turns two years old.

Children really cannot do anything but see mushrooms. These add a little bit to the food bin. However, mushrooms do disappear quickly so you have to show them the mushroom right away. Otherwise, children are pretty much useless (minus one special child but I do not want to ruin that part of the game for you).

For the first few days, expect to be BORED out of your skull. You may just want to turn off your game and check it periodically. Otherwise, you will be sitting around doing pretty much nothing at all.

Once the game gets hopping, it becomes somewhat enjoyable. As long as you can build enough huts, you can max out your population at 90 or so. I once had twins though so the population did rise to 91 once, but I
believe 90 is usually the max for villagers. You can also start solving the puzzles slowly, but surely.

Once your population grows like crazy, research goes so much more quickly, you are able to unlock the additional levels easily. Those levels help you advance on the puzzles and for a moment, you think sitting around and waiting for Virtual Villagers: A New Home to get exciting was actually worth the wait.

Guess again!

What happens after you have gotten this far? I am sure you may have guessed it…nothing! Absolutely nothing happens and you just keep on living. It is the biggest disappointment in a game.

I feel like I wasted days trying to solve the game only to be let down. You do not expect such a crappy ending from any game, but it is enough to turn me off from the entire Virtual Villager franchise.

Will I be playing chapter two of the game series? Maybe for review
purposes, but after all the crap the first game puts you through I
doubt I will enjoy it.

Star Rating:

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!