Game Insight has been in the city building and simulation business in the mobile sphere for quite some time, and the studio’s newest game, Trade Island, serves as a showcase for that experience. Trade Island has a goal that’s fairly simple at a core level; jam-pack as many things to do as possible into a city-building game. Your character will do everything from handling local commerce to hunting for treasure and investigating mysteries, just to name a few of the scenarios built into the game. That, of course, is all in addition to the game’s core conceit; building and interacting with a massive city within a flourishing tropical ecosystem.
The game has many of the basic city builder boxes checked, much like its predecessors. You’ll tap on buildings, you’ll plan buildings and blocks out, you’ll pay for upgrades, and you’ll collect things and make enhancements that allow you to build a bigger, better city. The twists come outside of that core experience. For starters, you start the game out having essentially inherited an island from your uncle, who is out on an expedition, and that means that you don’t entirely start from nothing. You’ll have a run-down village and a lavish bit of paradise all to yourself at the beginning, making it a bit quicker and easier to get started out than in comparable titles. From there, you’ll attract residents to your island, and bring in revenue and resources through shrewd deal making, well-planned building, interacting with your citizens, and generally leaving no stone unturned. You’ll even be responsible for the island town’s framework and transit system, making this beautifully-rendered city builder extremely deep.
Game Insights may have a real knack for city builders, but that’s far from the studio’s only expertise. Game Insight is responsible for hits like first-person shooter Guns of Boom, western-style RPG Dragon Eternity, and the empire-building The Tribez series, among others. The studio’s pedigree goes back nearly a decade, and it has fourteen well-received games on the Play Store, along with numerous efforts on the Apple side of the pond, to show for it.
Update: An earlier version of this article noted that this was a spinoff of Paradise Island, Game Insights has reached out to inform us that is not the case. The article has been updated accordingly.
