Tiny Island Survival Reviews

—edit—
After reviewing other review responses I see this is a money grubbing company also that probably won’t fix any of the issues I notated down to 1 star
/——

Games great in its own. Could use some extra features like more mining spots for the two higher end island materials and more rocks all together. Also a way to escape the dungeon with going floor to floor. But…. The game is so poorly optimized that while running the game my phone won’t charge with a 2.1 amp charger and phone get unreasonably hot. Make playing it for long periods unfeasable. I’m certain it’s something to do with the ads but not willing to spend 7.99 when the only thing I want is to disable the ads. All the extra items will make the gameplay to quick and loose it’s value to me. 1.99 would be a reasonable “remove the ads” pay structure. Albeit ide prefer the old 2015 ways of .99. And to counter this would be to add the other items in the pack in its own way making it were if you got everything in the starter pack not in the bundle cost more(like 9.99) that way people will still be interested in the 7.99$ fee in game already but have the option for just ad free for players like myself. Won’t give higher rating till the over heating problem gets solved or explained. Only other game I’ve played that has done this(and worthy of the problem) is like asphalt and other high end graphics games. So not a phone problem.(Xs max) But I do get the problem on money grubbing ad based games also.

I like this game and find it entertaining, but there is not an elevator that you can use to get back to the floors that you have explored. As a result of this, having to manually click the staircases for each floor really starts to get annoying to the point of being infuriating. Put in an elevator, this is ridiculous! Also, why is there no way to level up? I understand the purpose of the hearts, but I strongly believe that I shouldn’t be losing an ENTIRE heart from something on the first dungeon level if I say, have a level 8 blade. If we can level up weapons and tools, why can we NOT level up the character? And why do our upgraded tools all look the same?! This is another ridiculously stupid oversight. Also, we are mostly collecting tools and items, but where is the food? How is the character surviving on the island? Why can’t we level up our tent? Why can’t we create armor? Why can’t we upgrade our carrying capacity? These are basic things that are in the most basic of games. But they’re missing from this. It would be nice if we could put some of the islanders to work too. All that they’re doing is just sitting there.

Super cute, LOVED it for the first 45 minutes. Then it got kinda tedious, and then it got so hectic that it wasn’t worth it anymore. It takes SO many materials with only one spawn point, that are also being stolen by enemies you have to collect a ton of those materials to damage. But that wasn’t so bad, because you could build fences to keep them out. But then, NEW enemies appear who are faster and stronger, they tare down your fences and you have to upgrade your weapon to damage them—but they’re still constantly taking all the resources you need to do this.
It’s also annoying you can’t que up tasks, and there’s no “extra” materials to farm just to sell that don’t serve a purpose towards game advancement, so it’s nearly impossible to get extra stamina without making game progress even more impossible than it already is.
Very frustrating, because it’s a great game if it was just more enjoyable and less hectic. Maybe add a difficulty setting or something?

So far, the game is great. It’s the perfect time killer and it’s fun to explore and unlock new resources or npc’s across the map. However, there are a few tweaks that I really think the game could benefit from. First off, either give us a way to speed up ore generation wether it be an upgrade through gold coins or materials, or just speed it up in general. When upgrades start to require more than 10 pieces of an ore it’s extremely sluggish having to wait while you just farm extra wood and stone that you don’t need. Second off, please add a gate in the upper right barrier between the iron and the silver. It’s annoying having to run across the perimeter of the map just to get one resource that takes super slow to spawn. Even when you have barriers around both ore generators to protect it from mobs the fact that you have to run around the map just to get to them is sluggish and annoying. Or possibly give us a way to increase movement speed as the character is really slow. That could be an upgrade too and it could cost gold coins or material. One more thing that’s more of a quality of life rather than critical game mechanic change. Allow us to pin upgrades so while we are out collecting resources we can look in our inventory or maybe a whole new tab and see exactly how many resources we still need to make our upgrade.

This game is great but there could be some super minor changes made to improve it. Things like the mines make those resources super hard to come by, and levelin up your tools doesn’t seem to do much except make you able to get different things. Maybe as you level up (like every two levels) it multiplies the amount of resources you get ? Either x2 or x1.5. Also, for some things (like trees) yiu have to be positioned in a certain spot to chop them down. I’ll be on one side of the path and have to walk all the way around to chop a tree i was just next by. Maybe make it so you can hit it from everywhere, or make the character walk a little faster? It would be cool if the skeletons dropped items as well (besides the ones they steal). It’ll give more of an incentive to attack them rather than just leave the barriers open. I really do think this game is good !!

Hey everyone it’s E here,

This game was pretty enjoyable and had some unique gameplay elements that work well for a mobile game experience.

The first half of the game was a great ramp up/tutorial as it introduced all of the concepts of elements, hearts, tools, and enemies. And really got you prepared for the surprise at the top. Completing this part wasn’t terribly difficult or slow but it was just slow enough that I felt like the top became a longer term goal. And getting to the top after a while felt quite rewarding.

*spoilers*

The second half of the game turns into a very pleasant dungeon crawler with a simple but really difficult to perfect combat system. From this point forward it becomes a very grindy slow game, which is quite fun if one enjoys that style of game. It’s nice how I could hop on the game and chip away at the goal bit by bit and upgrade by upgrade.

Using the bonus mechanic really is the fastest way to complete the game, as it shaves off significant time from many of the upgrades and can seriously cut down on the grind time of the game. But this mechanic is completely optional which was nice, although when I was close to an upgrade sometimes the Bonuses we’re welcome with open arms.

Will be waiting for the updates as I think this game has a lot of potential.

Overall I’m feeling a light 7/10

I have played this game a while ago, and came back to write this review. This game is very addicting and a lot of fun. There is always things to do hence a player could go for hours without realizing the time passing by while playing. Because it’s so addicting, I think the game has more potential, and I have two proposals that could improve the game.

One, the game already has over 2m downloads. This should be enough players to cut the “remove ads” price down to a cheaper one, such as $1.99 USD. I, as a mostly f2p mobile gamer could see this cutdown as a bigger benefit for both the developers and the players. This also leads into my second proposal.

Two, release more content. The game is already addicting as is, so why not expand on it? I’ve read another review mentioning how there should be more islands, and I completely agree. More islands with more things to do, more fights, maybe a boss battle, maybe a slightly bigger island, and maybe even some lore in each island. If the game is left as is, the high price to remove ads would definitely not be worth buying, nor would any other in-app purchase, and most players would just leave the game eventually due to—not only the ads—but the lack of content as well.

Hence the 4-star review. The game has potential, so bring that potential out. Have a cake today.

The game is really fun and I really like the graphics, a few suggestions I’d make is connecting the paths between older and newer areas as well as upgrading the waves and ocean visuals since it’s so much of the screen.

Some feature and update suggestions:
Perhaps in the late half of the game some options could be added to upgrade your island in different ways. Here are some of my ideas:

Use wood, stone and iron to create a shop that sells potions to regenerate stamina for 30 coins and some materials. Also sells backpack upgrades for more slots and space per material (past 99)

Food such as meat and apples that you get from killing monsters and cutting down trees that you can eat to replenish parts of stamina.

A tavern you can build that sells food. A post you can build for the guy you sell things to for better prices.

Perhaps you can build a dock and boat and trade with players online.

A furniture store/boat to buy beds, closets, decorations, plants, etc.

Upgrading your tent into a house that you can access and customize.

A day night system and a weather system.

The ability to travel to a randomized island by building a boat, the island could be 1/3 the size of the main one and randomly generated with rare or increased materials on it.

More types of materials like steel, diamond, etc.

I really enjoy the game and I think this stuff would make things even better :)

I am overall very pleased by this game, its very cute, seems to take inspiration from Stardew but very watered down which is perfect for a phone game.

Pros: Easy to understand, cute art style, easy controls* and very fun initial couple of hours.
Genuinely 0 bugs in the time I have played (very impressive, devs definitely good at what they do).

Cons: After around level 7 of your sword upgrade the game becomes a very slow, frankly boring grind, no new gameplay features, just reskinned enemies with the same animations and damage values.
The UI could use some loving, the inability to open your inventory while resting is a big one for me. The controls, while easy can become tedious when attempting to fight groups, very imprecise and janky since there is no way to choose when you attack or which enemy you attack.

Changes I would make would be letting you open the anvil even if your hearts are out but not letting you upgrade if your hearts are low.
The ability to open your inventory while moving and while resting.
Make the dungeon area slightly larger and make the enemies attacks more varied.
The ability to upgrade the iron and silver mines.

I know its just a mobile game but I really like it and would love to see some quality of life improvements. :)

I found this game while searching the depths of the Apple store. I dove into the category section of “offline games” and found this game. While playing this game, it was diligent to wait for the character to upgrade/build materials. The character is slow and reminds me of an RPG character from older game generations like Pokemon Gameboy/D.S. Warning, when you’re restoring your hearts you get an ad, and it doesn’t restore your hearts any further, it made me leave TinyIslandSurvival on default. Although once things start progressing further away from the island, it starts becoming addicting as the setting is cute and you want to know what else the island has to offer. And dying in the middle of the floor levels was annoying. Although I still liked this game, just some short cuts (teleportation?) and better ways to advertise would be better(like offering material for extra lives). This game has more potential, like adding more adventure in the game. Other than my complaints, this game was well done, although I’d like to see more. It’s unfortunate the Apple Store hid this game with bad games.

So far I’ve been playing the game for 3 days straight. It’s time consuming to collect resources for upgrades but I enjoy exploring. I bolted to see how far the cellar goes for fun and made it to B18F. So it was cool seeing all the variations of enemies. Hopefully there’s still more to explore. It would even be cool if every couple of stages there are some bigger boss enemies. Maybe there is and I haven’t been able to make it. But fingers crossed for it. As I think that would make it rewarding to keep going down farther and farther for continued play value. Would love to see more updates to this game in terms new islands, tools, challenges. One draw back, I of wish the cellar screen would take up the entire screen instead of just be a small window to interact with. It makes traversing and attacking enemies harder bc there’s not much room on a phone. Maybe on tablet this wouldn’t so much an issue. But it would be nice if on phone maybe the screen could be rotated when your in the cellar to make it easier to navigate?

This is gonna sound live a dev wrote it.

It really is such a simple yet awesome game.

1. It has very few adds I played it for an hour and had 5 adds. And they where long like 5 seconds to skip.

2. It is not locked to micro transactions, it has like 2 things you can pay for and it never offers to them you have to click on the shop button. And if you don’t buy it you can still progress in the game.

And you can choose to watch adds and they will give you resources but you have to click on that button to do so. It doesn’t just pop up and try to get you to accidentally hit it

3. It simple and not full of a bunch of flashy click 18 places to do one thing.

There is one small downside

1. It advertises there new game pretty often but you can click anywhere off of the add and it does away with no time limit.

Message to the dev.

Honestly I love this game please keep making games like this and not like clash where your fighting supper long waits or micro transactions.

The only criticism I have is when you go to click on something and your tool isn’t a high enough level please make it to where it doesn’t waste a heart. It’s a little hard to keep track where level boarders are.

Also add a donations button where we can donate how much we want I would absolutely donate to you guy

Thank you for making a awesome game

I love this game. You can actually just relax while playing this because 1. It’s so cute and the design is simple but very pleasing to view 2. The game play is not super challenging but you do have to think a bit to figure which tools you need to upgrade first 3. The ads are not constant! Which I love and greatly appreciate that the developers made it so that they wait until you regenerate hearts to play an ad, perfect!
A few other things I love is that the wait times are not ridiculous, like when you regenerate your hearts it only takes a few seconds. There are times when you have to be patient but i find the timing for all of it so perfect and just enough to make the time challenge your patience but quickly reward you. As well, I love the step by step process that you go through to upgrade, build defense, and battle.
I really appreciate the developer’s work as I can see they really thought of everything to make it perfectly enjoyable for the player. Very cool game! :)

This is a fun game… like another commenter said, the surprise at the top of the hill was nice. And I’d agree with all the positive things said in other reviews so I won’t rehash them here.

So as far as suggestions… maybe a “double-tap” so the character moves faster.

Some of the resources are much more difficult to come by than others. Maybe the ability to upgrade ore mines if you wanna grind for one specific resource.

There doesn’t seem to be a storyline, maybe that was intended… not asking to add one if this is what the developers were shooting for to keep the game simple. Right now it seems the point is to keep leveling up, and watch ads for bonuses (I’d pay to have that stop). Or maybe that’s the point… the developers are making their money through the ad views, and the game works as it is to get the player to watch ads. It’s not as bad as other games that force ad views, which is why those games get deleted quickly. Here you have to make the choice to click the ads to cut resource grind time, and maybe that’s the psychological trick.

I’d like to see maybe some achievements… like finding hidden items or places, and maybe ad an idle element to the game, maybe you can hire a character to mine some stuff while you are offline.

Other than that… nice and simple fun game.

I really enjoy this game! I’m not a huge gamer, so I don’t find a lot of games interesting or fun. But sometimes I don’t have anything else to do, and when I want to play a game, this fits my personal preference. It is a nice way to relax and play. I love the little characters and all the different ways to level up. I also appreciate that, while there are ads, they are not super disruptive. You also don’t need to pay to gain more coins and hearts, you can just play the game longer, which I personally enjoy as it is a bit meditative that way. I think it is nice how it starts as a cute island with a mystery and then develops into something very adventurous and more challenging. I think that the interactions are nice, but a bit simple. I would love for there to be more (optional) development of relationships between the characters as well as with the landscape (like gathering flowers or changing outfit going farther down the island onto the beach and into the sea, ect.).
But it is still fun and a great game that’s free. Thanks for all the hard work to make it nice!

Wow.. what a great game! I could not stop playing this game! Sadly, I beat it in two days. I can’t wait til the next update.

Recommendations: A few thoughts, I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but I would suggest adding personal customizations. Maybe after killing 100 or 1000 of a specific mob a traveler will show up on the island and you can buy rare items or even something simple like masks or clothes just to customize your character.
I would also consider adding special events or weather in the game! Although if I personally love the grind, the game does get a little repetitive. A bigger music play list would help out!
Lastly, I would also think about adding on to the tent or home. You could consider adding the possibility to upgrade your home. You could have a chest inside the home that upgrades with the house. The chest will have a max storage based on the lvl of home.
Just some things to think about!!

Another comment. I really appreciate the use of adds in this game. If games have adds every ten seconds, I simply cannot play them. Because the game is free I did expect adds. Great job on not drowning your game in adds! Keep up the great work guys!

If you need to relax, why not play this lol, I’ve been playing a little under an hour now and I’m curious to know how much more this game will expand it just keeps adding with more stuff to do, there’s no set objective you get to explore and figure it out yourself which is nice when all these games today have quests and missions and lists of things to do it can be overwhelming and eventually turn boring doing the same daily missions etc., this game you do have some freedoms. It’s what the game suggests you are trying to survive on an island collecting, building and crafting! What more do you want! And being free to play they need to make their money somehow, the ads seem to be well placed, as I’ve notice they only come up when you are resting, and they offer bonus materials for ads seems fair to me!

To the Developers:
Awesome job! There is however a small visual glitch that I’ve noticed when you obtain a new heart, it doesn’t always register that you’ve used all your energy, it’s not game breaking by any means just a small thing I’ve noticed!

The game is essentially as advertised; you are on a single pixel art island going through a gathering and crafting loop to progress further inland. That said, the game is very compelling and superbly well made. There is no dialogue or tutorial but the game design itself explains essentially all of the mechanics. There’s even a surprising amount of choice in how you engage in the world (do you want to gather resources yourself or farm them off enemies?), and a fair bit of depth to the mechanics (for example, you can use different pathing methods to avoid fights or kite enemies).

There are areas where the pacing drags a bit. Some resources are slow to respawn and you may wind up standing next to a resource waiting for it to come back for a while. The game offers a new gameplay loop partway into it that makes resource farming a bit easier but a lot of the stuff I was enjoying earlier wasn’t part of this new loop. I found myself sitting and hoping for an ad to watch to speed up the process.

That said, the wait times we’re talking about are maybe minutes long. It’s absolutely reasonable. And the game was an absolute gem otherwise. Easily worth a dollar or two, and it’s free!

If your looking for a game to keep you entertained then you found it. However, the game has a lot of potential and room for improvement. For starters add more areas to explore and dungeons. You could do this by adding surroundings islands only accessible after beating the previous one. Then each island could have its own theme, civilization and dungeon. The mobs in said dungeon should match the theme. For example you could do a winter island, volcano/lava island, jungle island and a desert 🌵 island. Some mobs could be mummy’s, snakes, salamanders, yeti’s and so much more.

You could also add armor and different material material. I like the weapons but there should be different option like a long sword that does more damage but takes longer to strike or a dagger that attacks fast but does less damage. As for armor you could have the player start of with some type of leather armor then move to steel and then to titanium or some other material. The hearts you get in the game could also be improved. I like the row of twelve but at your thirteenth heart you could just change the color of the first one to orange and so on. if you take damage it’ll turn back to red.

It’s a great game and keep up the good work!!!!

I’ve enjoyed this game. I played half the day yesterday and half the day today and finished the game. It took a lot to get there though. Lots of running back and forth in the game to get the higher end items.

I really enjoyed the basement levels and working my way down. I liked seeing the probability of the vases items and finding the right floors for the items I want. I did watch lots of ads and I think they fit well with the gameplay. It takes just over 5 seconds to earn hearts so it plays a quick 5 second ad and then you can click out of it with 2 clicks. (Every other game I’ve played it’s 3 clicks to exit.) And then the other 30sec ads are optional but they are worth it for the items and money they give, or to save your money if you die.

The boss battles were fun, I just didn’t know they were going to happen until they were happening. I died the first times and then leveled up my sword enough and went back and beat them the second time.

All in all I liked this game and I’m always trying new apps. Not every game is set up well like this one. The only suggestion I have is to have a guidebook that you can click on that helps direct you, tells you what items are used for, and what enemies you’ve fought or will fight. Something like that. Thanks for a great game!