Beastie Bay app review: Pokémon meets an island sim 2021

Introduction

Imagine, you’re stranded on an island where you meet 3 different animals. You pick one as a companion and you start building a society on this island. Kairosoft, the Japanese developer behind hits as Game Dev Story and Dungeon Village makes it a reality through this SIM app.

In a clever and humorous mix between role playing game and simulation, you start discovering and expanding your island while collecting critters to fight for you on your exploration adventures in this iPhone SIM app.

Is this one of the best SIM apps for iPhone gamers? Keep reading our Beastie Bay app review to find out.

Starting your adventure

As mentioned before, you start by picking an ally. I opted for the duck instead of the cat or the dog as I wanted to be a bit experimental. After building a house for myself and a pasture for my duck, we started exploring the island.

Before I knew it, my collection of allies grew with the addition of a mole with claws, a water droplet and a walking broccoli. Exploring the island basically shows a progress bar in the bottom of the screen where your main character walks, finds treasure, avoids or deals with obstacles and bumps into enemies.

When that happens, the battle commences and you turn to the battle screen, which is very similar to the Nintendo franchise we all know. 

Continue to grow

By exploring new areas, your island gets bigger and you discover new people and technologies. You can use these to make your island better and more profitable.

When exploring a dockside, you discover a monkey researcher, Chimpan Z, who will help you discover new technologies. With a raft, you can explore different islands and make new friends, who will then be able to visit your island as a tourist, so make sure that your tourist facilities are in order!

Shops will make money, lumberyards supply you with wood and your allies will gather food for you, all needed to progress in the game. Sometimes you’ll wish the game goes quicker, but you’ll have to wait until an in-app purchase for that option becomes available.

In addition to these resources, you also need medals, which you will get by booting up the game after a while, and as rewards for achievements and exploration. These medals are scarce, but are used to upgrade your usable items and therefor hugely valuable.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Fun
• Lots to do
• A big world to explore
• Replayable
• Able to finish without purchasing anything

Cons

• No landscape mode
• In-app purchased become available later in the game (such as speed up time)

Free and fun to play

Beastie Bay is a really fun free to play game. Although it doesn’t exceed the developer’s previous efforts, being free and having tons of contents should be sufficient for people to try this one out.

The graphics and music are pretty old school, but add a ton of charm, while the critters and monsters sometimes are a complete Pokémon rip-off. The app is designed for both iPhone and iPad, even though landscape mode is not available.