Forestopia Review
From the creators at Gravity Game Arise comes Forestopia. By way of beautiful graphics and a friendly yeti, players can grow their very own island paradise, complete with plants and animals to keep them company. Despite these cute aspects, Gravity Games Arise’s sim does not have much for gamers to look forward to except for mindless tapping and ad watching.
Soothing Graphics and Music
As soon as players open the app, they are greeted by an island filled with soft colors and music that seems to float out of nowhere. This makes the player feel immersed in the title, as if they are hanging on the island with the yeti themselves. Players start out with a short tutorial where the yeti shows them how to create the animals and plants, along with cleaning the island. The short tutorial shows players what almost the entire game consists of.
The island keeps growing the more that players level it up, and no matter what the addition is, the creators continue to impress with gorgeous graphics. The yeti can be found almost anywhere on the island, helping the player tend to the plants and animals. There is a period where he will harvest the resources while the player is offline, however it is very short. The player can extend that period of time, but it is still a shorter offline period than most idle games.
Just Keep Tapping
Forestopia is a personal island that has all the animals and plants that the players have nurtured wandering around. Those same animals and plants give them more resources, but they only pop up every few minutes. But there is not a lot of offline storage for those resources, requiring the player to be in game constantly tapping at the resource bubbles above the animals and plants. This makes it difficult to leave the game and continue to accrue the resources necessary. There are resource boxes to help the players get the bananas and seeds acquired more quickly by watching a short ad. These boxes are a great help in the beginning of the game if things seem to be moving too slowly.
Trash appears all over the island when players first start and continues to appear throughout the game. Continuing to clean the trash gives the player certain resources and makes the island look better. This is just one of the many things that players have to keep tapping in order to progress.
Not Much to Do
While Forestopia is a cute game for those that want to sit and tap, there is not a lot to do outside of tapping. There is plenty of leveling up of plants and animals; however, all of it is acquired by tapping away on your screen. The player has both daily and main quests that they can complete to further progress, with the rewards being more resources and ways to buy upgrades for the island. The downside is that some of these quests require the players to watch the in-game ads.
There is a mini-game within Forestopia, which provides a way for players to get more resources. When players go exploring in the hot air balloon, it takes them to a place full of tiles that they have to tap to find resources, but tapping the wrong tile means completely failing the mini-game. Personally, this held no appeal to me as it was just more tapping in a game that is already full of tapping.
Overall, Forestopia is not one of my favorites, though it is still a cute way to kill time. While the graphics and music are wonderful, the difficulty to accrue resources, the ad system and the need to endlessly tap resource bubbles loses its appeal rather quickly.
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