Lolapps Launches Critter Island, a Polished Tourist Sim Game for Facebook

The latest game from LOLapps is out, an island management game called Critter Island. It’s the company’s first title since early this year, and a significant step away from its earlier brand-oriented games.

Critter Island is quite similar, in its broad objectives, to plenty of other island games. You start out with a small parcel of land, which needs to be filled with businesses and attractions to make incoming tourists happy. However, the smaller details and grace notes of the game make it clear that LOLapps has paid close attention to how social games are evolving.

When you first start out in Critter Island, your little green isle is empty. On the south side sits a small dock; within moments, this will be receiving boatloads of tourists. So the first step is to put down some buildings, of which three general types are available: food, fun and drinks (shopping comes later). Part of the game is keeping these buildings stocked with supplies.

Tourists will immediately stream toward the first building, which if you’re following the tutorial will be a bar. This is where the “Critter” part of the game’s name comes into play. A few of your visitors will be ordinary humans, but the majority are an assortment of odd characters: drink-swilling, huge-beaked birds, bobble-headed sharks, scuba divers, and so forth.

Each incoming tourist will have a particular kind of attraction in mind; as long as they find what they’re looking for, your island will make money and become more popular, especially if you also put down some decorations. There’s also a mini-game of collecting the stars that pop out of satisfied tourists. Once enough are collected, tips are multiplied by three for the rest of the day.

For the most part, that’s the game — LOLapps is planning an expansion involving multiple islands later, but for now the game involves managing just one. There are a few things that make Critter Island stand out from the pack, though.

The first of these you’ll probably notice is the sound. Critter Island is accompanied by a gentle looping track featuring guitar and steel drums that’s a step above the average. That may seem like a small point, but the music keeps the constant dings, jingles and joyous outcries from tourists from becoming annoying.

It’s easy to zone out to Critter Island, just watching the action of tourists moving around and clicking to pick up stars and refill inventories as necessary.

There’s also a third action that comes up quite often, too: collecting earnings. That just takes a single click, but the result is money pouring from the building to your coin counter that’s satisfying to watch every time. Like the music, these little touches don’t seem like much, but a similarly high level of polish is typical of most successful social games, at this point.

One notable absence from Critter Island is any sort of pop-up asking you to invite friends to play. That’s a refreshing change of pace, but could end up affecting LOLapps’ rate of growth for the game, too. And maybe the developer will add more invites into the game at some point in the future.

Of course, there are still social features to the game. The bottom bar is reserved for adding friends, and you can help out when visiting a friends’ island by restocking a business for them or giving tourists flowery leis. Unfortunately, that seems to be about the extent of it for now.

Overall, Critter Island is a solid new game. Island management games have faded in recent months as a popular category, so LOLapps may be a bit behind in that regard; however, the game’s strengths should help give it a fighting chance. With luck, LOLapps is working on some additional social features that will make Critter Island stand out even more.