It's the PlayStation 3's time to start building! Akimi Village was released a while ago and if you're not familiar with the name, think of Keflings. Still not ringing a bell? NinjaBee's Xbox Live Arcade franchise started out with one of the first games to use the dreaded Xbox avatars, A Kingdom for Keflings. Last year, we got to mess around with its sequel, A World of Keflings, which carried over all of the best from the resource gathering and building world had to offer.
Akimi Village is pretty much the same type of game. After choosing your character, whether it's a boy or a girl, you're given the task of aiding a race of 'very' little people with the rebuild and cleaning of their world. There's a group of core materials you have to start out harvesting and from there, a handful of blueprints to build from. Each building carries an unique function. Some help you generate more villagers to help with the gathering of these materials, while others, for instance, help turn stored items into other types of building blocks that you'll use for different constructions.
Just like the 'Keflings games, your goal in Akimi is to build every single blueprint. There's no particular challenge to this, in the 'challenge' sense of what games have come to accustom us to watch out for. You're never put in any danger nor will you have to fight any enemies. Building and harvesting are the only goals, and even though they might seem simple and crude at first, they're not.
This is a ridiculously busy game. You won't feel like you're aimlessly playing it at any point thanks to a very well paced style of gameplay. There's always a new goal to strive for and just like 'Keflings, you're always treated to some very funny writing and an extremely colorful visual presentation.
Sadly, though, some of the gameplay improvements introduced in A World of Keflings did not carry over to Akimi. You're not given the option to move buildings that you construct nor are you able to guide workers into helping you complete blueprints on their own. The interface is also a little hard to figure out, due to small and sometimes similar looking icons that are confusing to pick out from.
Regardless of some of these issues, if you're in the hunt for an easy going game that doesn't treat you like a 6 month old toddler but isn't as complex as a military strategy simulator, Akimi Village might just suit you. It's a fun download that should take you about nine hours to get through and after you're done saving a world, you can take your gathered resources and help other players online save their own, if you so wish. |7
