One of those great sequels that require zero experience with the prior installments in order to fully enjoy the game.
Players begin the Secret City by naming their tribe and learning a bit of back-story on the tribesmen they are about to starting managing. After flourishing on other portions of the island, certain members of the tribe are forced to search for other inhabitable areas of land to house the village's growing population. After a storm lands the expedition team on a isolated (and deserted) cove, your villagers find themselves stranded, and must work to rebuild this secret city before the elements get the best of them. This is where you come in.
At the start, you will be led through a short tutorial on how to control the villagers' actions, and how to recognize their needs, etc. Basic gameplay revolves around you clicking on certain villagers and dragging them to areas that require their attention. For example, one of your first tasks in the game will be to start a fire to keep the villagers warm. In order to do so, you will have to drag a villager to a pile of dry firewood (thereby "showing" it to him/her). Afterwards, you must drag them to a pile of dry flint, and then must command them to start the fire itself.
Most aspects of the game will continue in such a fashion, whether you're dragging villagers onto broken buildings so that they can repair them, or onto fruit-bearing trees so that they can harvest the fruit to be eaten. All in all, there are 16 major goals to be fulfilled throughout gameplay, with the last goal being to open the locked door at the peak of the village, thereby revealing the secret of the island to the villagers. Most of these goals have to do with returning the city to its former glory by repairing things like the bathing system or by planting a garden, but the gameplay here goes far beyond these laid out tasks.
Each villager can focus on one of five major areas, consisting of building, parenting, research, farming and healing. This is done by using each person's individual menu, which shows off their name, age, gender, health, skills, and other basic info. By clicking on the check box next to Building, for instance, that particular villager will focus on building and repairing objects, while clicking on Healing will encourage the villager to study medicine in order to be able to heal their comrades when they become sick.
It's this aspect of the title that adds a lot of strategy to the gameplay. As your population grows, you will want to make sure you have enough builders, researchers, farmers, doctors, etc. in order to keep the village running smoothly. While farmers and builders are pretty self-explanatory positions within the community, research oriented scientists are a bit more complicated.
By collecting various vials found around the island, the broken alchemy lab left by the previous inhabitants of the Secret City can be repaired, enabling your villagers to create potions and run experiments thus earning you tech points, the basic currency within the game. After accumulating a mass of tech points, you can enter the tech menu and choose areas in which to increase your village's productivity, by making certain skills more powerful, and also by choosing your alliance between nature and magic.
As you progress through the game, you will likely uncover a cave near the old bathing system that explains a bit of the story behind the previous inhabitants of the city. Two groups of people lived in harmony on the island – one group focused on and praised the powers of nature, while the other aligned with the side of magical incantations. By choosing your own alliance, you will be able to have better healers, farmers, etc. depending on the side you choose.
And while you do take on the role of god-like ruler of the Secret City, a chief can also be assigned to help maintain order within the village while you are away. Due to the fact that Virtual Villagers is played in a real-time format, when you leave the game, gameplay will continue, allowing you to set your workers into motion before you go to bed for the night and be able to return to a completed task in the morning. This makes the assignment of a chief that much better, since when left to their own devices, your residents will mainly focus on mundane tasks like washing the laundry.
Luckily, the speed of this real-time continuation of gameplay can be changed from normal to slow or fast and even turned off, for when you know you are going to be away from the game for a while. This is especially helpful since you wouldn't want to come back to a game full of dead or dying villagers because they all ran out of food while you were gone.
If, however, you forget to check your game in a while, and you find yourself with a sick and dwindling population, you can always encourage your villagers to procreate by dragging males on top of females. If there is chemistry between them, they will "go indoors" and perhaps emerge from the procreation hut (for a lack of a better term) with a baby. And while children are pretty useless in terms of building, farming, and other "adult" tasks, they are mandatory to completing the main side-quest in the game, that being collecting various seashells, feathers, turtle shells and other random objects that will pop up around the island.
Since the gameplay here is pretty deep and involved, it's disappointing that the actual gameplay screen is on the small side, allowing you to only see a small portion of the village at once. However, the reason for the small screen isn't necessarily a bad one, as there are two informative bars acting as a boarder around half of the screen, a main menu side bar, and a "villager information" bar along the bottom of the screen that gives you a quick overview of a selected villager's name, main skill and current action.
And with so much going at once in larger populations, I am happy to report that I encountered no lag whatsoever throughout gameplay, and was pleasantly surprised in the quality of the technical aspects of the game as a whole. The graphics here are bright and cheery, with tropical flowers, trees, and other plants dotting the landscapes, and beautiful coral reefs providing for a fun swimming spot for villagers.
Another nice touch here is the inclusion of a real-time weather generator, which will send rainstorms and blankets of fog-cover through your village at random intervals. The rain-showers are especially enjoyable, since the rain powers one of the machines you will eventually have access to, as well as the fact that they provide fun for the children who play in the puddles that develop.
Likewise, the villagers themselves are downright adorable, and fairly varied. While there is a limited number of costumes available for villagers to wear, meaning that you will have more than one villager wearing the same thing, the combination here between hair color, style and overall character demeanor help to separate each one from the next. This is true to such an extent that I was eventually able to pick out a particular individual from a crowd, even if he / she was standing next to someone in the same outfit, just based on their mannerisms alone.
Furthermore, the sound effects here are very nicely done. A tropical soundtrack plays throughout, comprised of numerous tracks that are each long enough to make the transition from one song to the next an event in and of itself, since it will have been a considerable amount of time since you have last heard the next track.
All in all, Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City is one of those great sequels that require absolutely zero experience with the prior installments in order to fully enjoy the game. And with low system requirements, most everyone with a semi-modern computer will be able to play the game for themselves. For those who enjoy either the tycoon or RTS genres, The Secret City is enough of a mix of both of those genres and more to keep most players entertained for hours.
Review part of GrrlGamer.com. Full review and screenshots at: http://www.grrlgamer.com/review.php?g=virtualvillagers3