Virtual Villagers 2by Last Day of Work is a solid simulation game that puts you in control of a tribe on the island Isola. You start off with a handful of villagers who are pretty much trapped on one side of the island after exploring a cave. One of the more interesting things about this game and a feature that I was glad to see was aging. Your villagers get older as the game progresses and during their life you can teach them skills that might come in handy around the small village. With some time any villager who has trained long enough can become a master at his/her craft. Although kids cannot be trained in any particular skill they can be used as diversions or little scavengers (because kids eat everything). There are several factors that play into how your little village will develop and how many people it will hold. Your food is not unlimited so farming is necessary for supporting a large amount of people. You can fish and that is some pretty neat stuff because the designated fisherman dives in for them, talk about old school. There are of course plenty of other ways to get food like climbing trees for coconuts, irrigated farming etc except the game seems to be missing cannibalism. Well, I know I was looking forward to cooking up the dead-beats.
One thing you will need if you take this game up is time. You will need to check up on your resource guzzling tribesmen and women regularly or they will eat all of their food, the food that you helped them stockpile and maintain. And then they just might sit around their campfire and try to summon you, imagine? But really, they can be a hassle sometimes but reasonably so. Another thing worth noting is that by training one villager in multiple skills and mastering a few, that person can become the elder of your village which is handy for speed purposes. The game is not exactly easy since you only have so many people to begin with and since things get done so slowly you will need to carefully decide who gets to do what. The game features a short and very time consuming tech tree, it takes borderline forever to progress even with the game speed on max but I suppose if you could beat it in one day, it wouldn’t be Virtual Villagers.
When you get some time you can direct a villager toward some of the unlockable secrets of the island that will have you wondering who was there before you. The games in particular do seem to have certain things in common, most notably the game play since it pretty much stays the same throughout the series. The touch screen controls run smooth when you drag and drop the tiny people. The graphics are alright, nothing to go crazy about but all things considered they aren’t bad at all. Virtual Villagers 2is one of the better looking games and more balanced town/village simulation games in the Android app store right now so try it for free and if you love it, it’s only $1.99 on the market.
