Review: Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City

LDW (Last Day of Work) has finally released the latest in their Virtual Villagers series. This time around, VV3: The Secret City goes back to the island of Isola, or rather another side of it with a combination of simulation, adventure, and virtual inhabitants . While this game plays pretty much like its predecessors, such as being able to adjust level of difficulty and speed, there are plenty of new features. Our highlights of VV3 and additional screenshots after the jump.

To begin with, this real time virtual life game features a Tribal Chief. Although this person doesn’t exactly do much beyond contemplating and lecturing, there are a few trick up her/his sleeve, so try tooling the leader around to see what is available.

Weather has been added and directly affects the play. You will need to use the different aspects of the climate to keep your poor inhabitants from starving. While we were playing early on, we found that we just couldn’t keep them from worrying about food most of the time, so we suggest you build your tribe slowly.

Again, there are collections, tech to add knowledge to your group, and more difficult puzzles to figure out. We love that they incorporated graphics similar to two of their other games, Fish and Plant Tycoon.

Look for features of navigating around the larger map with your keypad, the addition of awards to mark milestones, and the ability to pause without leaving the main screen.

VV3 is available for PC, Mac, Palm OS, and Windows Mobile, if you want to travel with your group. While we already know that this will be a fave of fans of the first two, we suspect anyone will find it as addictive as LDW’s other video games. We certainly did.

(Thanks, Carla)

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