If you’ve sunk thousands of hours into series like Cities Skylines, Tropico, and Frostpunk, you may consider yourself something of a city builder god. Well, here’s a game that lets you literally earn that title, as These Doomed Isles puts you in the shoes of Greek, Celtic, Japanese, and Mayan gods and asks you to build a kingdom. These Doomed Isles has just celebrated its 1.0 launch after a spell in Steam Early Access, and it gives you plenty of plates to spin.
Not only is it aiming to create the same satisfying action you find in some of the best city building games, but These Doomed Isles also borrows elements from games like Slay the Spire and Balatro. Yes – you’ll be building decks as well as building settlements. Each of the game’s four gods – Cernunnos, the Celtic god of nature; Plutus, the Greek god of wealth; Acan, the Mayan god of wine; and Inari, the Japanese God of Rice and Prosperity – come with not only unique abilities but also bespoke decks of cards. These cards will let you expand your land, place buildings, gain loyal followers, and provide useful buffs and modifiers.
So, as well as being strategic with what you build and where you place it, you’ve also got to play with the hand you’ve been dealt, to use a perfectly-apt metaphor. If that wasn’t enough to keep you busy, your island settlement will be visited by invaders. Waves of enemies will regularly pay you a visit in an attempt to conquer your people, and they’ll become progressively harder the longer your settlement survives – you’ll even encounter some very tricky bosses.
As well as building proper defenses to protect the island, buried within each god’s deck are cards that will help you fend off these invaders. Because you’re a god, they’re pretty epic – you can call in meteor showers that will hurl space rocks at your enemies, or you can summon a storm from the ocean surrounding you to wipe them out.
As part of These Doomed Isles’ 1.0 release, developer Triplevision Games has also dropped a big update that introduces a 34-mission campaign mode featuring all four gods, a challenge mode that lets you pick the difficulty and specific challenges you’ll face, and a rework to card research and harvesting that relies less heavily on RNG when it comes to pulling new cards from your deck into your hand.
These Doomed Isles is out right now in 1.0 on Steam. If you want to learn more about the game and pick it up for yourself, head to its store page here.
For more amazing god games you should definitely check out our guide, or for those of you intrigued by the deckbuilding element of These Doomed Isles, here’s our list of the best card games on PC right now.
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