Game Quicky: Island Maze (Switch) ~ Each Island Is A Maze

Official Nintendo microsite – Drageus microsite

From time to time, I enjoy trying out cheap games. Especially when I have some budget leftover and I see a game that looks interesting. That’s why I agreed to write a small review article on Island Maze for the Nintendo Switch. It’s a game Drageus Games developed themselves instead of porting the game over. So, let’s take a look at this game with the review copy that the developers provided. Now, in this review, you will find my 100% honest opinion on the game but feel free to leave your opinion on the game and/or the content of this article down below.

Positives

This game is quite easy to grasp and has an enjoyable concept. The idea is that you get to the goal in the least amount of moves possible. The catch is that you can’t move over a colored tile without the correct gem. So, you have to think about how your dice is going to move over the field before moving.

Now, the game might seem to limit in the controls department, but you have a lot of helpful tools at your disposal. You can rotate the camera, zoom in and out and even undo moves. You can also reserve the camera’s direction when it doesn’t feel right to you to control.

This game allows you to skip levels. Whenever you are stuck on a certain level, you don’t need to play that level. When you complete 10 levels with the least amount of moves, you unlock every level.

The music is quite relaxing. It fits the atmosphere of the game amazingly well. Together with the amazing visuals, the game looks and sounds amazing. Maybe a bit more sound effects would be nice but then again, I think I would get sick of the dice rolling sound effect extremely quickly. Maybe one or two sound effects in the menus would be nice.

Negatives

There are a few glaring issues in this game that I want to address.

The first issue is that the undo button only works for one move. So, if you noticed a mistake that you made ten moves ago, you better restart.

Secondly, there is no hint system. So, when you are stuck on a level, there is no way for you to know more. So, if you don’t understand a new mechanic right away… You will have to experiment.

For some reason, the “-” button brings up the controller connect menu of the Nintendo Switch. This serves no purpose in the game at all.

The naming of this game is a bad decision. If you Google: “Island Maze”, the results are mostly the island mazes from Breath of the Wild. If this game was a simple hobby project, I wouldn’t mind it too much. But, I think that in future the developers should pay a bit more attention to the naming in case they want to promote their game online more easily.

This game has been out for a year on Steam. Compared to the Steam version, which is a tad bit cheaper mind you, nothing has been changed. I think that after a year, the game could use some new levels and mechanics to give the game a bit more depth.

Final Thoughts – Conclusion

This is a good game, but it’s on the wrong platform. The audience for the Nintendo Switch isn’t an audience for quick and short casual games like this game. I think that the game would be better suited for mobile platforms. I felt that touch controls would work better for this game. Honestly, the game gave me that sort of vibe.

Apart from the broken undo system, I don’t see anything wrong with the game. This game is a cheap and enjoyable puzzler that can be entertaining for a rainy afternoon or when you are waiting for the doctor or when you are traveling on the bus or something of that nature.

I’m just a bit sad to see that this game is so short while the concept has a lot of promise. I enjoyed my time with this game but I wouldn’t blame people when they get bored with this game or skip it.

And that’s everything I wanted to say about this game. Thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care!

Score: 3/5

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PSA: See stolen content from content creators? Content theft!

Today, I had an unpleasant surprise this morning on the train to work. I found out that two websites actually stole my content! This was such a let down since the amount of content that was stolen from me is more than just one article. It’s almost all my articles from December. While I was working on contacting other sites and blogs that got content stolen, a good blogging friend of mine Drakulus wrote this article. And it’s actually a great lesson to learn. 

What do you if you come across stolen content? Do you ignore it? Or do you do something about it? What if the stolen content you come across is yours? 

WordPress is a great place to publish content of all sorts. Some people like to use it as a diary. While others, like myself, us it to express their love for gaming by reviewing games, writing excellent opinion pieces, and being active within the WordPress community. Some people, however, don’t use WordPress for any of those things. They use WordPress to steal other people’s work and post it as their own. They use it to make money by leaving half links to the creator’s blog to avoid suspicion and they use it to attract followers that would have no idea that the content that they’re reading and enjoying belongs to someone else. That’s what we’re here to talk about today. 

A fellow blogger has had a good chunk of his content stolen by two different blogs. The blogger is NekoJonez and he and I decided to write a piece on how to prevent something like this from happening in the future. The blogs in question are wponlinetutorials and proxly. Now I know I can’t accuse someone of theft without proof. How’s this for proof? (original article, written by me)

That post was taken from NekoJonez without his permission and posted on that site. He wasn’t asked by the owner of the blog if it was okay. They just took it and posted it as their own piece of work. That’s not cool and something needs to be done about it and that brings me to the point of this post today. 

NekoJonez note, if you want more proof, just look at the dates of my article about Nintendo Pocket Soccer Club. I published mine on the 10th of December and this ripoff blog published it on the 17th December. Yeah. 

If you want to do something about this to prevent this from happening again we need to look out for each other. We need to report these people that are doing this crap so they’ll know we’re serious about defending our hard work. I don’t know about you, but it takes me a few hours to write a single article sometimes. And if I knew someone was profiting from my work I would be pissed too and that’s why I’m doing this. I went through both blogs and noticed a lot of stolen content. Most of it is from NekoJonez, but other blogs were stolen from too. 

We’re bringing this issue to light and you can too by opposing this. Stealing is bad and shouldn’t be tolerated. Help us take these guys down by reporting them to WordPress. Click here to file a complaint. If enough people come forward and do this WordPress is going to have to force this person to remove all their stolen content or remove their blog completely. 

Let’s stand together and defend our work from thieves that are looking to profit from it.

NekoJonez here again. So if you notice other blogs or websites just copy and pasting somebody else’s content without using it in a good context, notify the content creator as quickly as you can. Personally, I wouldn’t mind people quoting me or using excerpts from my article to talk about their points, but if you copy the whole article, that’s another story. The content creator always needs to give permission before you use it, it’s just etiquette. 

I really want to thank everybody who already helped me file complaints about this so we can resolve this issue as soon as we can. I’m really thankful to all other bloggers who actually reported the stolen content as well so this will be resolved.

If you notice my content ever being stolen from another blog, use my contact page/DM me on Twitter or any other social media platform.

If you notice other blogger’s content that gets stolen, like I said before, contact the blogger in question before you take action. If the content owner wants you to report it as well, he or she will ask.

Also, try to not make a big fuss about it at first. Why am I saying this? The reasons are simple, don’t wake sleeping dogs AND don’t give a website unneeded traffic. Who knows, they might have a system with links set up, that every time they get clicked they earn money.

I think I can speak for all of us content creators here, we are always thankful that our audience reports stolen content to us. This way we can avoid people abusing our content and avoiding creators giving up on following their passion!

It’s never fun to see your content stolen since you put your time and effort into it. Having to deal with researching, contacting hosts and WordPress and other blogs who got content stolen is so time-consuming and you lose time spent elsewhere in your life. On the other hand, you could argue that we shouldn’t care, but what’s the point then of writing content again?

Thank you for reading this PSA written by me and Drakulus. Thanks for all the support and help! Feel free to tweet this article out, share it on Facebook or on any social media platform so we can raise awareness of this issue and start fighting it.

(PS: How ironic would it be if this article gets stolen from NekoJonez’s Gaming Blog and posted on one of those bot/stealing websites)