Survival Island 1&2 is an escape RPG where you collect and combine various items, gradually building better tools, until you can repair a boat and escape the island.
Initially you can’t access certain terrains, then you finally make items that let you do so, effectively opening up more of the game. Likewise you can fish with better rods and better bait, getting different items.
It’s an extremely well-designed game, with several features that make it particularly playable:
- Recipes let you “drill down” into each ingredient: so if you don’t have enough Thin Rope to create Stout Rope, just click on Thin Rope in the ingredient list and it will take you to the recipe for that. (Not got enough Tapioca glue to make the Thin Rope? Just click on that!) ie: you don’t have to exit the Stout Rope recipe and make all the ingredients separately.
- It’s relatively easy to gather basic materials: only once or twice did I have to make an effort to gather herbs and cassava. Most of the time you easily have enough.
- The game is forgiving: healing is cheap/easy (cassava), death doesn’t seem to have any penalties – and is a useful way to get back home quickly. In the one trickier block puzzle, if you mess up a placement, it remembers the previous stage, so when you exit/re-enter the zone to refresh the block, you don’t have to go right back to the the start.
All that said, it’s not necessarily easy. There are certain things that are very hard to figure out. However the game has a great hints system that nearly always knows what hint you need at any time. There are also some game forums on ChapterCheats as well as some information in a Wiki.
There’s no need to IAP as ads will earn you plenty of specials: I always had plenty of Inspiration capsules and Study books.
Bonus tip: you need to dig a 2×2 pit to plant the mini-coconut seed. You’ll also need at least three lots of fertiliser. Sort this out as early as you can, because by the time you need the fully-grown tree (Large log) it’s agony waiting hours for it to grow).