Akimi Village Review




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Developer: NinjaBee Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
Release Date: June 15, 2011 Available On: PS3

Akimi Village is a city-building game unlike any that I have seen before. It resembles more Animal Crossing than Sim City, but don’t let the cute graphics fool you. This is mostly about building lots of things and doing it in an efficient manner. This can be fun, but it quickly proves to be tiring.

You play as either a boy or a girl that wakes up on an island in the clouds. The game guides you through the tasks that you will need to do, such as collecting resources, building structures and managing your workers. In a real sense, this is much a game about supply-chain management as it is about city building.

Speaking of the workers, they are these tiny blue creatures known as the Akimi. These natives happen to live in a state of gloom, and oddly enough, putting them to work makes them happy. Essentially the Akimi are slave workers that do the majority of the work for you. You pick them up, assign them with a task (such as cutting lumber) and show them where to put the raw material.

Keep in mind that you do not have an infinite supply of Akimi. Instead, you have to find them by slowly clearing the world of gloom. There is a building tree for you to follow which gives you a linear list of buildings that are ready to be constructed. As you progress along the tree, you will earn these seeds that can be planted in fountains, removing the sadness from that area of the island.

The main thrust of the game is to build progressively more difficult structures that rely on each other. For instance, you will need early on a workshop, paper mill, lumber yard and so on. These are basic elements that a society needs, but eventually you will start to build more luxury locations and cultural destinations, such as bath houses and a theater.

Sometimes you run into real supply-chain issues. If you accidently select a character that you didn’t want to (or purposefully re-assign a worker), this can interrupt the flow of everything. For instance, if you only have one worker chopping bamboo and you change him to mining stone, you now no longer have bamboo for paper, which means that the paper used to make scrolls is disrupted as well. You will need to trace down the culprit to the source (the bamboo worker) in order to fix it.

When you have finally cleansed the island of all of its sadness, there really is not a whole lot to do. The game only takes about 8 hours to beat. Once you are done, there’s no reason to play again since the island does not even randomly generate. There is also no difference between selecting the male and female character.

Akimi Village is an untraditional city builder. It takes the basic elements of construction and mixes it with Animal Crossing cuteness. For eight hours of entertainment, the $10 price is not terribly unreasonable, but it also has no replay value at all. However, if you want a good way to earn some easy Trophies, Akimi Village has plenty opportunities for that.

Graphics: 7
Sound: 5
Gameplay: 7.5
Creativity: 7.5
Replay Value/Game Length: 7
Final: 7 out of 10
Written by Kyle Bell Write a User Review

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