ISLANDERS on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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ISLANDERS is a minimalist strategy game about building cities on colorful islands.
ISLANDERS is a relaxing, city builder and strategy game
developed by Coatsink, GrizzlyGames and Stage Clear Studios
and published by Coatsink.
Released on April 04th 2019 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 12 languages: English, German, French, Spanish - Spain, Simplified Chinese, Spanish - Latin America, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil and Turkish.
It has received 16,316 reviews of which 15,434 were positive and 882 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.2 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 1.99€ on Steam with a 60% discount, but you can find it for 1.19€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified ISLANDERS into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7, 8 or 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3 2.00 GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX950 or higher
- Storage: 200 MB available space
- Sound Card: We don't really think you need one. Just humming your favorite tune while playing is perfectly fine.
MacOS
- OS: MacOS X Yosemite (10.10)
- Processor: Intel Core i3 2.00 GHz or AMD equivalent
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX950 or higher
- Storage: 200 MB available space
- Sound Card: We don't really think you need one. Just humming your favorite tune while playing is perfectly fine.
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
ISLANDERS is a casual city-building game developed by Grizzly Games, Coatsink, and Stage Clear Studios while being published by Coatsink. Gameplay Islanders is all about scoring points by strategically placing buildings on your procedurally generated islands to achieve highest score you can. It's pretty simple! Every new session you get a random island with option of selecting a starting building pack, each providing thematically similar buildings in limited numbers. Use these to obtain enough points to be able to collect another building pack, place these, rinse and repeat until you gather sufficient amount of points to move onto next random island! To obtain points you select a building from inventory and place it on the map, in this case island. Each building has certain sphere surrounding it, showing off the distance at which it will earn or lose points from existing buildings or other environmental structures. Every building has structures that are compatible and give it extra points when in the sphere, and incompatible, losing points when placed near them. To make it easier on math side, game shows you potential points you can get when placing a building on selected area but before actually putting it, as placing anything on the map means it will remain there permanently. Careful placement and forward planning are important to maximize the score you get! Once you obtained enough points, you can travel to next randomly generated island and start building it up from the scratch. Game is over if you have placed all buildings you had in your inventory and didn't collect enough points for another pack to get more structures, or if you don't have enough points to progress onto next island. Then it's back to the start! Worth mentioning you cannot reload the game as every placement you make automatically saves your game and there is no way to revert back to previous states. Playtime, replayability and other modes Impossible to determine how long your playtime will be. Can be 5 minutes, can be 50 hours. Game is set on constant attempts at getting highest score so I would say that does count as replayability. Islanders has second mode called "Sandbox Mode" where you get to roughly select how your dream island should look like to afterwards build it up anyway and with anything you desire. Name of a mode checks out! Impressions Islanders is a tricky little beast. It's a really good game however due to its nature, it takes certain conditions and mindset to fully enjoy it. Otherwise you might end up in a uphill-downhill scenario on "enjoyment scale" like I did, which is described down below. I can safely say that first impressions were great. Something that is a massive positive from the start is audiovisual side of the game, low-poly minimalistic artstyle with vibrant colour palette looks fantastic, very pleasing for an eye. And you mix that with relaxing soundtrack that you can enjoy or just turn off and play some of your favourite songs or podcasts perhaps, depending on you. Audiovisual aspect never got old for me and by far was my favourite part of the game. Islanders is quite unique in the city-builder genre. There is no resource gathering, traffic management, technology research, no sidequests or optional objectives. You have a building, you place it, you get the points. Repeat the process until you are done with a session or lose and start all over again. Safe to say simplicity and minimalism it offers is not for everyone. Those who seek more variety, to simply put it, will get bored. Game balances between relaxing atmosphere and strategical approach to building placement quite well, while randomness coming from what structures you get and on what island you will place them adds necessary element to spice things up! First hours were enjoyable yet painful and very "game-over", as I was learning mechanics and buildings, while top of enjoyment hill came roughly at 15-20 hours mark. At that time I discovered all buildings and learned basics on how to optimize my runs for more points! Unfortunately afterwards is where it went into downhill territory for me and where my whole issue with recommendation chimes in. Past those 20ish hours game starts to fall off. With nothing new to discover and basics of strategy played out, game wears out and starts, or at least started for me, to be boring, with its key aspect of simplicity turning into double-edged sword. You place same buildings as before in roughly same learned patterns/configurations for maximum points. You start to yearn for something different to do, as randomness of game wears off, especially if you play Islanders in longer sessions. Something that turned out to be a negative for me is layout of islands. It's always a single island while game could utilize multiple, smaller sized islands for ultimate challenges, with player needing to piece around a whole archipelago of medium/small sized land for you to connect around. Plus game doesn't have that many layouts surprisingly, in my playtime I encountered same islands even 3 or 4 times but simply with different colour palette and very minor changes, extra tree or rock here or there. Also was not a fan of island transitioning. Points collected on previous island don't stack up. No matter if you get 10 or 10000 points on an island, when you move to next island your start is always same, you don't get any extra packs or "easier" start for all the points grind, only higher score for leaderboard. Which, goes without saying, is riddled with cheaters anyway so. To make that whole gibberish I wrote make sense: Islanders is good, but to fully enjoy it you should treat it as a smaller sidegame in between big titles. Something to play for 30-40 minutes as a way to relax, either with some of your favourite tunes or with chilling soundtrack game offers. You should not do what I did, which is grinding it for hour or even slightly longer daily and without playing anything else to break the routine. I assume that is a main reason why my personal experience later on was just...boring, mediocre, even if I had fun in those 20 hours but that is still...less than half of my actual playtime. Game itself can be a nice gateway into more city-builder titles which have more mechanics in them. Final words and conclusion If you will enjoy this game you might be interested in a news that a sequel was recently announced! (As of when I'm posting this review.) It seems to be improving some aspects I was complaining about so I might have to check it out in the future... Relaxing audio, beautiful visuals and minimalism provided in gameplay makes ISLANDERS a great choice for short, casual city-building sessions, but long runs can break the cozy feel it provides. Feel free to check out [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31947302/] my curator page for more reviews!
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This is a puzzle game, not a City Builder, Strategy, or Building game. It is more similar to Tetris than to anything called a "City Builder"— the "City", "Builder", and "Buildings" aspect of this puzzle game are esthetic and have no baring on gameplay. The "Buildings" are blocks that are inert once placed but which dictate what things you want to put around them; there is no "City" or town or village except in the way a Tetris game can look like stairs if you put the pieces in a particular way; and the strategy is abstract point-maximization—there is no population count, no happiness, no economy, no people. Once I started playing this game I enjoyed it for what it is. And the price point at $2.50 is absolutely reasonable. However, I would not have bought it if I understood what kind of game it is.
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The quintessential city-builder I keep coming back to. I think the newest update made it harder but that's just a fun new challenge. The designs are beautiful :)
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ISLANDERS is a serene and tranquil procedurally-generated, endless, score-based puzzle game which has a city-building theme to it. Although its tagline states that it is "A minimalist city builder," this is slightly misleading because the city-building aspect is moreso an aesthetic rather than a core identity of the gameplay since it doesn't involve resource or population management like the more traditional city-building games and is also less predictable due to the randomness of the maps and some of the building layouts. Overall, I recommend the game as it is very relaxing to play casually for an hour or two here and there, while simultaneously having just enough depth to satiate score-chasers, and the procedural generation of the maps constantly challenges you to adapt to the random terrain and natural features that you are provided. Although I don't care to compete for high scores, I found that attempting to optimize my cities was unexpectedly fun and especially gratifying after planning the general layout of my city and watching the points come flooding in as my plan came to fruition. Note: this review is current as of the unnumbered patch released on 23 November 2023 which is the latest update. S U M M A R Y - The gameplay is very accessible to a wide range of players as it is simple and intuitive enough for casual players, yet also has enough depth to challenge score-chasers, but the game is very minimalistic and offers little to no precision when it comes to building an efficient and aesthetically-pleasing city; - The replay value is decent and the game is fun when played occasionally in shorter sessions but the core gameplay loop will get repetitive very quickly; - The graphics are vibrant, almost cartoonish, and are reminiscent of the "Chibi" art style; - The soundtrack is composed of relaxing ambient music with rural-style sound effects to give the feeling of an authentic city; and - There is no story whatsoever but a casual puzzle game like this doesn't have a need for one. A C H I E V E M E N T S The game has 38 achievements, most of which will be acquired throughout casual gameplay while a few will require you to go out of your way to set them up but aren't difficult by any means and should take less than 10 hours to achieve; however, the Conqueror achievement will take at least 30 hours by itself and require you to become very familiar with the mechanics of the game while also planning the general layout of each map before placing any buildings. That being said, it isn't nearly as RNG-dependent as many complaints on the Steam Discussion forums would lead you to believe as you merely have to invest some time into the game to learn it beyond a casual level since the achievement is not a given whatsoever. R E V I E W Gameplay The gameplay is more akin to a puzzle game rather than a traditional city builder because of its focus on simplicity and minimalism: a map is procedurally-generated, you are given a choice between two random sets of buildings, and your inventory is populated with a number of buildings from the chosen set. Your goal is to place the buildings efficiently in order to receive point bonuses from other types of buildings and meet the point threshold which gives you another choice between two more random sets of buildings. This process repeats itself until you either fail to meet the point threshold, by having no more buildings to place, or meet the threshold which allows you to travel to the next map and restart the gameplay loop, ad infinitum. As far as casual play is concerned, the game is simple and intuitive enough to get into and occasionally have fun with in small spurts. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for those who like to chase high scores because the game demands absolute precision when placing buildings and planning out your city but offers you very few tools to facilitate this need and the tools that do exist are quite shoddy. For example, there is somewhat of an integrated "snap-to" ability but it is finnicky and rarely lines up buildings perfectly with one another which can lead to inefficiencies and cause you to lose points -- and sometimes those few points could be the difference between losing a run altogether or proceeding to the next map. Sometime between 2019 and 2022, the game was handed over to an entirely new development team and they added the more difficult achievements which require a certain level of precision that the game simply can't offer and this makes the minimalist approach of the game feel almost incongruous with, and somewhat inadequate for, these new achievements (one of which is the infamous Conqueror achievement). If they had made the existing snapping more accurate, added an option to turn on a grid, or gave you a laser level tool, then the game would be feel much more precise but you can definitely tell the difference between the two development teams' philosophy on achievements. Another minor gripe that I have with the overly-minimalist approach is that the House, Mansion, and Park buildings also have a variety of different layouts (similar to Tetris blocks) but the next one is randomly chosen for you and can't be changed which is irritating from an efficiency perspective and true city-building aspect but I can't complain too much about it because it fits the minimalist design approach that they were going for. Nevertheless, I still found it quite fun to learn the more intricate nuances to the game's mechanics and optimize my cities; however, once I figured out the most efficient setup then the most fun part became the planning of the city and playing the actual game for long periods of time became a bit of a chore which is why I think that it's a good game to occasionally have fun with in smaller doses because it gets repetitive very quickly. The game also has a Sandbox Mode where you can unleash your creative side with an unlimited supply of all buildings and a Photo Mode where you can take fancy images of said creations using a variety of built-in filters and tools. Graphics The graphics are vibrant and almost cartoonish in nature which gives it a very charming look. The buildings are also blocky but in a cute and bubbly sort of way -- if anything, I'd say that its art style actually resembles the popular "Chibi" art style because of how cute, minimalistic, and caricature-like the art design is. The second development team also added a number of optional seasonal and holiday themes that you can apply to your game to spruce things up at your whim which is a nice touch. Sound The soundtrack is made up of relaxing ambient music with scenic noises such as dogs barking, birds chirping, and other rural sound effects. The music is so modest that I'm not even sure if the audio tracks would count as "songs". Much like the graphics, there are a number of optional seasonal and holiday-themed songs that you can enable or disable but I frankly couldn't even tell the difference between any of the songs. All-in-all, it's just a very relaxing soundtrack which I would say resembles white noise to some degree. The sound effects are few and far between but the main one you will hear is placing a building which makes a very satisfying plopping sound. Conclusion Overall, I recommend the game because you can easily relax to it for an hour and forget about the stressors of life as you get immersed in its soothing audio, charming visuals, and straightforward and leisurely nature. If you're more of a score-chaser then it's surprisingly fun and engaging to plan out your city, optimize the placement of your buildings, and get that feeling of elation as your plan flourishes and you watch your points soar.
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This game is a great way to scratch the city-building itch, without having to invest hours at a time. It's very easy to play, with 0 learning curve: just click where you want to place your buildings. There are no resources, and very few decisions to make, other than what building to place and where to place it. The game uses a minimalist art style that looks good and meshes well with how lightweight the gameplay is. I would not recommend this game to someone who only likes complex mechanics and deep strategic planning - I enjoy those types of games, but for me this is an excellent change of pace every now and then.
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Frequently Asked Questions
ISLANDERS is currently priced at 1.99€ on Steam.
ISLANDERS is currently available at a 60% discount. You can purchase it for 1.99€ on Steam.
ISLANDERS received 15,434 positive votes out of a total of 16,316 achieving an impressive rating of 9.22.
😍
ISLANDERS was developed by Coatsink, GrizzlyGames and Stage Clear Studios and published by Coatsink.
ISLANDERS is playable and fully supported on Windows.
ISLANDERS is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
ISLANDERS is not playable on Linux.
ISLANDERS is a single-player game.
ISLANDERS does not currently offer any DLC.
ISLANDERS does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
ISLANDERS does not support Steam Remote Play.
ISLANDERS is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for ISLANDERS.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 13 July 2025 00:33 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 12 July 2025 22:03 |
| Steam price | 13 July 2025 04:28 |
| Steam reviews | 12 July 2025 15:57 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about ISLANDERS, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about ISLANDERS
- SteamCharts - Analysis of ISLANDERS concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck ISLANDERS compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
100
Developer
Coatsink,
GrizzlyGames,
Stage Clear Studios
Publisher
Coatsink
Release
04 Apr 2019
Platforms
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