SPB Software House Spb AirIslands review

Spb AirIslands is not what it seems.

Opening up the game reveals a simulation in the style of Sim City, where you're tasked with building a civilisation from scratch, gathering resources and constructing a variety of buildings to grow your community of virtual humans. The background story involves the rebuilding of a collapsed civilisation of islands, suspended in the sky by 'gravitators'. Your main objective is to rebuild the gravitators, but this requires you to get the community together to gather the wood, bricks and water needed to generate enough money to pay for the construction.

The simulation requires all the usual skills to manage and foster its growth, but the twist to the game comes from the means used to accumulate the resources. Rather than making all this an integral part of the simulation, you're taken off to three separate arcade-style games to build up your supplies, one each for wood, water and bricks. Wood gathering takes the form of Xonix II, where you must cut the onscreen wood block into pieces using a laser cutter, tapping the screen to change the direction of the cutter, which you must do to prevent it colliding with various obstacles, such as moving ball bearings and various tools. This is addictive, although play gets quite difficult as the levels progress.

For water gathering, you're directed to Bubbles. This is Spb's variant of a game that involves firing coloured balls from the bottom of the screen to make groups of three or more adjacent balls of the same colour, thus clearing the play area to stay alive. It's good fun, but the weakest of the three sub-components of AirIslands, and the one you're most likely to get bored with.

Arkaball II is your route to brick collection and is a superb variant of Breakout. Move your bat along the bottom of the screen to deflect the rebounding ball and clear the screen of bricks. The usual power-ups are all there, adding a variety of help and hindrance along the way, such as an integral machine gun for your bat, extra balls and a wider or narrower bat.

Combining four games in one, AirIslands is excellent value. But if you're not too keen on one of the three component arcade games you may lose interest in the game as a whole. While you can trade resources, such as selling water to buy bricks, the quantity available for trade is often small, so you may end up playing your least-favourite game more often than you like. Still, it's good to see a clutch of games grouped together in such an original fashion; this may be the start of a new genre.