Game: Isles & Tiles
Genre: Colony Sim, Resource Management
System: Steam (available for Windows, and macOS)
Developer | Publisher: Birdworks
Controller Support: None
Price: US $12.99 | UK £10.99 | EU € 12,79
Release Date: August 25th, 2025
Review code provided, with many thanks to Birdworks.
Isles & Tiles is a puzzle game with unique twist: you have to build a city with the correct amount of buildings to fit a certain goal. You get unlimited cards, but you have a limited number of turns to complete these challenges.
Isles & Tiles Gameplay and Feel
Isles & Tiles looks a lot like Dorfromantik; however, there are a lot of differences. It’s a tile game where you need to place land to build on, and the buildings can only go on certain types of tiles. Each day and some of the tiles cost mana, and you have a limited amount of mana to be able to place all the tiles you need to in order to win. Mana might be a limited resource, but there are also ways to gain more through the use of buildings and cards. As you complete challenges, you unlock new cards and new quests to get even more cards.
This wholesome little game packs a lot of content into its little frame; there are six main challenges, each with five difficulty levels. As the levels get more difficult, you start with fewer cards, have higher mana decay, have higher thresholds to win, and more things like that. The more challenging difficulties also have random events that can cause you to gain a card, lose mana, gain mana, or things like that. Some of the higher difficulties are pretty challenging in Isles & Tiles; you really need to resource manage to be ready for whatever it throws at you next.
The Pros and Cons of Isles & Tiles
Isles & Tiles gives you victory points when you win a level, allowing you to unlock new artifacts, new cards, and other things to add to your deck. This will thin out your deck, however, so it’s important to turn off the cards you don’t want in the main menu before you head into the level you want to try. If you accidently leave a card out of your deck that you need, you’ll need to start over from the beginning. Also, the unlock system is random; you need to click on mystery cards to unlock new ones. So sometimes you’ll have a card that is basically unusable until you unlock the ones that work with it.
The look of Isles & Tiles is a colorful, cartoonish kind of look, reminding me a lot of Settlers of Catan. I have a feeling the developers were inspired by this board game and video games like Dorfromantik, but took these familiar genres and added a little something extra. I think that the game is fun, has a lot of depth to it, and is really beautiful.
I had a lot of fun with the ten or so hours I spent in this tile-building world. It has a surprising amount of lore for a game with no NPCs or characters, and it’s really nice to look at. It has no timers, so it’s also calming and has a lot of charm. The sound was a little bit of a let down; Isles & Tiles has pretty basic music that is pretty repetitive. The sound design is fine, but nothing special.
One of the other issues I had with Isles & Tiles is how zoomed in it feels all the time. I don’t know why the cards have to be so massive on the screen or why I can’t easily zoom in and out on my island. It feels like the frame of the game is really big, leaving too little room to view my island I’m trying to build in the center. However, it is nice to see the cute artwork up close.
Conclusion
Overall, Isles & Tiles is a fun game that has a few little things I don’t like about it. I really like all the different modes, and I wish there was more to do. I would love to see a kind of endless mode and a creative mode for this game; I feel like those could add a lot of content and fun to the game. A great game with a great premise and pretty to look at.
Check out my gameplay of Isles & Tiles on YouTube!
Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.
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