Escape from Paradise with an island adventure includes five games to take a break from the beach grind. Beach and grind in the same sentences? When your people spend most of their time cutting trees (sorry, Al Gore and environmental activists — these aren’t real trees, y’know?), building huts and catching food, you’d call it drudgery too.

In doing reviews, I try to avoid referencing other games except to indicate what the game resembles. However, I can’t overlook the similarities between this one and Virtual Villagers. Even having played and finished Virtual Villagers 2 (VV2), I had a good time playing Escape from Paradise .

Both games offer advantages and disadvantages. If you can only get one, I couldn’t begin to recommend one over the other. Let’s talk about Escape from Paradise for a bit as VV2 has had its day. You land on a tropical island when your cruise ship crashed and encounter Mr. Tiki Man. Tiki dude guides you through your adventures on the island, so talk to him often.

Like VV2, you help your people build, eat, drink and socialize. Otherwise, if they’re unhappy, they work slower or leave your tribe for another. The game also involves finding parts to build a radio and playing one of 17 mini-games, which is where the game resembles Tropix.

The games help you score points and other surprises. Thankfully, you don’t have to win all of the mini-games to complete the game. I simply sucked at some of them. Five of the games appear somewhere on the island and you unlock their levels as you progress in the game. The other mini-games appear where the 30 challenges you have to do one-by-one to survive on the island.

With many elements thrown into the game, the whole thing comes together nicely to create an adventure game with strategy, arcade and puzzles thrown in. The variety works great for those (me) who bore easily like with Nanny Mania, but that’s another review.

The speed and inability to move people from one spot to another drove me berserk. Like Sims-style games, this one plays out in real-time and at times, I can’t do anything but wait for the people to build something before I can move on. I’d love to click a fast forward button. You can play the mini-games to help past time as the people continue working while you play.

It’s a long walk for the little people to go from the starting part of the island to the latter part of the island. In Virtual Villagers 2, I could pick up villagers and plop ‘em wherever. This one requires waiting until their little feet get them to the destination. One of the cuter parts of VV2 was helping villagers become parents and watching the babies grow up. The villagers had more personality than those in Escape from Paradise . I laughed more with VV2.

Unlike VV2, this one doesn’t take days to finish. It took me about two days plus I did it without help (there wasn’t much available yet). I needed more help with VV2 and picking up all the items turned into a chore. Your people work to rack up skill in both games. This one had three skills while VV2 had five, but I preferred this one since it was easier to get an idea of how much work it’d take to move up to the next level. VV2 could take twice as long for one skill for one person than it does for another.

VV2’s ending could’ve been better considering it told you bits and pieces of history and it could’ve wrapped up nicely had it told you the complete story. Both games equally drew me in and their endings were about the same — not as exciting as hoped, but not terribly disappointing either.

Download a free trial of Escape from Paradise.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP
• 600MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM

[tags]game review,Meryl K. Evans, pc games[/tags]