Head back to the island paradise of Isola to solve the mystery of the lost children!
Continuing in the tradition of the Virtual Villagers franchise, The Lost Children is a very accessible PC game that borders the line between the genres of tycoon and real-time simulation.
After becoming familiar with their new home (the main task of the first game), the people of the tropical paradise of Isola soon discover a mysterious cave, and decide to investigate. The two main explorers quickly fall prey to their unknown surroundings, as they fall over a large waterfall, only to find themselves stranded in a completely new part of the island, face to face with a group of even more mysterious children. Who are these children? Where are their parents? How have they survived for so long on their own? All of these questions and more with become clear as you progress through the game.
While other installments in the franchise begin with a majority of adults and just a few children, here you are met with a much more challenging situation. Your village's children outnumber the adults, meaning that you have many more mouths to feed than available hands to work. As only one of the original inhabitants is old enough to help your two main explorers, you must quickly formulate a plan to find enough food to keep your villagers alive.
That being the case, you will have to wait a while before tackling many of the game's 16 puzzles, which range from creating a fire to uncovering a set of ancient ruins, with a large variety of tasks in between. As food is arguably the most valuable resource accumulated in the game, you will want to quickly teach your adult villagers to fish, and wait until some of your children grow old enough before deciding to rebuild huts or research into the island's interesting plant life.
In order to "teach" your villagers how to survive, you must click on them individually and drag them to the places you want them to investigate. In keeping with the fishing example, you would drop an adult into the water by the beach, forcing them to look for fish. Likewise, when rebuilding a hut, you would drop an adult onto the damaged building, thereby showing them that it needs to be fixed.
After you have found enough food, the entertainment value of the game really begins to rise. With full bellies, your villagers can now begin to investigate the island more thoroughly, and will quickly discover a group of herbs that can be combined in various ways to create potions with varying effects. Some of these potions will give your villagers a boost in health after eating, while others may simply give off a lovely scent that invigorates your researchers. Other combinations are actually used to complete some of the game's puzzles, so thorough research is a must.
Researching also garners you tech points, which can be spent to upgrade your villagers' abilities in farming, building, etc. as well as to raise the overall well-being of the village itself.
Your villagers can do more than just research and fish, however, as you must teach them carpentry skills in order to repair the various huts found on the beach, as well as help them learn about medicine so that sick villagers can be healed. Without these huts and healing abilities, your village will easily fail as all of your inhabitants either grow too old or become sick and die.
Another major aspect of the game that can work both for and against you is the real time clock that is forever running after your begin your journey. Unless you manually pause the game, it will continue to progress even while you're not playing. While this is a fantastic plus, letting you leave the game for an hour and come back to lots of completed tasks that you didn't have to wait for, it can also spell certain doom if you forget that your game is running and/or don't play for an extended amount of time.
Adding another level of complexity to the title is the inclusion of the children themselves, who offer up their services as mushroom finders and treasure collectors. While collecting treasure is, for the most part, a voluntary task, searching for various shells, etc. does add another bit of fun to the whole formula.
But, of course, eventually these children are going to grow up, meaning that if you want to continue to search for treasure, you must make your villagers reproduce by "introducing" them to one another by dragging a male or female onto a villager of the opposite sex. If you get lucky (no pun intended), your village will have a booming population in no time.
For a series of games as complex as the Virtual Villagers titles are, I am incredibly surprised at just how easy they are to pick up, and at the very minimal system specs required to play. Almost the entirety of gameplay is laid out in a very easy to follow tutorial, making the game perfect for younger and more casual players who don't find the prospect of reading a large game manual entertaining.
Another great aspect of the game is the look and feel of the title. As compared to the third installment, of course the graphics are going to seem worse here, with slightly blurry details on individual villagers, and a softer, rather than extremely detailed, look to the backgrounds. The vivid color scheme of this tropical island is visually pleasing, however, even if not incredibly realistic.
On another positive note, the soundtrack here is just as good, if not better than that of other installments. Funky and upbeat tropical tunes play throughout, giving the game a fun hum-along-with-the-music quality. Furthermore, the sound effects are effective at conveying the action taking place all over the island, whether you are viewing that particular action or not, which adds a nice sense of realism overall.
In the end, Virtual Villagers 2: The Lost Children may simply seem like more of the same formula only with different villagers, but with an entirely new portion of the island to explore, along with 16 unique puzzles and almost limitless gameplay options spread over literally hundreds of hours of gameplay, more of the same seems like an incredibly fun concept, from this GrrlGamer's point of view.
Review part of GrrlGamer.com. Full review and screenshots at: http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=virtualvillagers2