The Promised Land

Game Category: Casual - Strategy, Adventure
Developer / Distributor: Boolat Games / Alawar Entertainment
Release Date: 28 Jun 2012
Rating: ESRB - Not Rated

Click image to shop online

Boolat Games, the people who created the Amelie's Cafe series of casual time management games, are here to bring you on a journey to The Promised Land. You will set sail from the Old World and venture into the New World. Once you arrive there, you will start off with 5 colonists who eagerly await your orders. Guide them and help nurture your settlement into a busy bustling colony.

Your ultimate quest however is to uncover the Spring of Eternal Happiness; reaching it will take a very long journey. On your way there, you will have to help improve the skill of your colonists, expand your city with new buildings, and befriend the friendly natives. Last but not least, you will relish battling the pirates (a la "Angry Birds" style) in The Promised Land.

The Promised Land beckons

The quaint little cutscene at the beginning of the game presents your arduous journey to the New World. Along for the ride is a courtly lady by the name of Isabel Right - your advisor. At the conclusion of your rather perilous journey (and with your ship looking to be in a bad state), you arrive at your destination - a deserted stretch of land that is rich with food and resources.

Isabel will be on hand to teach you the basics of the game. The first thing you'll do is to learn how to gather food for your colonists. Nearby are fruit-bearing bushes and trees; all you have to do is drag and drop any colonist onto these and he will immediately start foraging for food. Food is but only one type of resource though, so you'll need to divide your attention between finding food, wood, and other resources for your colony.

Isabel looks real prim and proper

After you've foraged enough food, you will find your next task listed as a series of tabs at the bottom of the screen. You'll get a bonus for completing any task and will find as many as 5 tasks listed together at one time. Some of the tasks will have a time limit, so you will have to efficiently drag and drop colonists to perform the required tasks on time to collect the reward.

Information about a selected colonist is summarized at the bottom left corner. A colonist has a name, his occupation, as well as the current action he is performing listed in the box. You'll also find three attributes - a food icon tells you how hungry a colonist is, a smiley icon indicates his need to socialize, and a red cross icon denotes his health (all that foraging can be quite dangerous).

Colonists need a home before they can start working

You'll find a mini-map of your colony at the bottom right corner. Most of it will be bare at the start of the game; you may even notice that some areas of the map are not accessible (like the plateau with the llamas). The little dots you see on the mini-map represent your colonists and the colour of each indicate their profession (grey indicates an apprentice, green a farmer, and so on).

To the left of the mini-map are four menus that you can access. From left to right, they are the Colony Menu, the Ship Menu, the Industry Menu, and the Knowledge Menu.

Time to build me a well

Pulling up the Colony Menu allows you access to the Buildings, Warehouse, and Colonist panels. The Buildings panel is where you pick which building to construct or upgrade in your colony. You get to build a town hall, houses for your colonists, a well, a forge, a laboratory and much more. Once a building has been placed, you should exit this panel and pull a colonist over to the foundation to see what resources you'll need to start building it.

The Warehouse panel is where you see how many of each type of resource you have. There are 30 different resources in the game, including food, wood, stone, fish, and iron. At the bottom of the panel is a row of artifacts that you've bought from the Old World; you'll need these artifacts as a pre-requisite to building something more advanced in the game.

Almost all panels contain important information

The Colonist panel shows even more information about each colonist. You even get to see their likes and dislikes at the top of the panel [Tip: Pay close attention to them]. Right at the bottom of the panel are the houses you've constructed in your colony and the number of colonists living there. [Tip: There's a shortcut on the main screen to reach the Colonist panel; look for the open book icon in between the colonist summary and task tabs.]

The Ship Menu has two panels - the Trade panel and Hunting panel. The former is a very important feature in the game, you will use it to send resources back to the capital of the Old World in exchange for gold to fund your colony. At the same time, you can place an order for any special artifacts or to get new colonists over to the New World. The latter is a series of 12 mini-games that involves you trying to take down pirates with a cannon. This mini-game plays like Angry Birds, but you get a limited number of cannonballs and angry pirates (instead of angry birds and mean green pigs).

See your cannonball fly!

The Industry Menu consists of an Agriculture panel and a Manufacturing panel. Here you get to fine-tune what you wish to plant and to produce. Planting is quite simplified, you decide what you wish to grow in three plantation fields that are 3 x 4 squares in size. You only get access to one field at the start, but will be able to grow even more later on.

There are six different types of production buildings, including the Forge and Kitchen. Each building has up to three kinds of resources that you can produce. For example, the Forge allows you to produce nails, tools, and machinery. You'll need them for building, otherwise you can sell them to the Old World for a hefty profit.

Forging ahead in The Promised Land

The final menu is the Knowledge Menu. There are three panels here - the Science panel, the School panel, and the Collection panel. The first panel allows you to research six areas - nature, agriculture, construction, industry, sailing, and archaeology. [Tip: You should place as many colonists as possible in your laboratory to speed up the research process.]

The second panel is used for accelerating the training of apprentices into an expertise domain (farmer, worker, builder, artisan, or scientist), or to change the knowledge expertise for a colonist (for example from a builder into a farmer or vice versa). You'll need to build a School first before you can use this panel. The last panel records your achievements in the game, rewarding you with bronze, silver or gold medals in various categories.

School's in!

There are many nice touches in The Promised Land and (besides the fact that you can play a logic puzzle game inside the houses you build) you will notice that the graphics is wonderful and smoothly animated. Although you may see the occasional repeated face of a colonist, the names and clothes they wear are usually different and help to distinguish them. The map you play on looks very alive, with running water, swaying grass and leaves, and jumping fish.

The interface is well done with the game play elements nicely divided up into a series of menus and panels. A handy status bar at the top the of the screen helps to summarize the most important resource quantities you possess.

The House Design screen is a mini-game

Pros:
If you like an adventure strategy game with excellent graphics, challenging tasks to complete, and the promise of new things to explore, then The Promised Land promises to fulfil your wishes completely.

The Promised Land offers many hours of great game play; I personally clocked in more than 16 hours to complete the game. The developers reckon a typical player will find himself playing for at least 24 hours before unlocking the Spring of Eternal Happiness.
Tasks range from building or upgrading a structure, producing or trading a number of resources, helping natives, and defeating pirates.

Building myself a bridge

Colonists can be left by themselves to perform assigned tasks - to feed themselves when they're hungry, to find someone to socialize with when they're lonely, and to heal themselves if they're injured. But, if you really want to, you can micromanage each colonist individually.
Besides the lovely and detailed hand-drawn graphics, the game comes with a strong soundtrack and realistic sound effects. I particularly liked the song with a Spanish beat to it.
You can continue playing the game even though you've completed your main quest.
The ending cutscene leaves you wanting for more. Now, where's The Promised Land 2?
You can try the demo for free.

Sell high to make extra gold

Cons:
Just a few comments to share here.

The tasks you must complete start to look similar more than halfway through the game.
There are infrequently short pauses (about a second) during play - I believe the game is saving your game state. That can be quite irritating.
The pirate battle missions remind me too much of Angry Birds.
If you want to play the game in the fastest time possible, you will find yourself micromanaging your colonists a lot. As in, "A LOT!"
The final task before the ending seemed out of place and was rather tedious (luckily there's a skip button) - why put it there in the first place?
The rewards for completing timed tasks are not really worth the effort. Being awarded hidden tasks could have offered a better sense of achievement.