Amazon Alive

Amazon Alive is a new social game on Facebook where you manage and keep sustainable development of a small village. To do this, you have to build kitchens, reservoir, houses, chestnut picker cooperative, lumber company, rubber tapper cooperative, gardens, cocoa and fishing cooperative and many other structures.

Review:

Naturally, you will also be in charge of collecting water from the water reservoir, making drinking water and cooking rice and stew in the community kitchen, collecting and processing chestnuts, cocoa, wood and rubber from the forest, planting and harvesting crops in gardens, catching fish in the river, and necessarily improving, or to be specific, upgrading houses.

All those look dull at first sight but turn out to be fun. All the structures you construct must be right beside one of the paths, which will ultimately lead to the port. The fishing cooperative, however, must be not only by a path, but also by the river to allow for dispatching boats for fishing. Simulation games seldom provide spacious land and expansion seems distant enough for players to ignore sometimes. The same is true for Amazon Alive. Furthermore, the river bank does not allow constructions, which to some degree explains why my village looks so crowded. As time goes by, you have to deploy paths yourselves sometimes.

Obviously, in order to make cocoa butter, you must in advance make Cocoa pulp in the kitchen, produce fire in the processing house, and produce wooden bowl in the house of crafts. With the butter, you could proceed to make chocolate, and then chocolate with chestnuts or chocolate powder. You can put your products for sale at the port where your friends are allowed to visit and purchase usable items.

In the gardens, you could plant rice, potatoes, corn cob and cotton. Their production time varies from 5 minutes to 8 hours. Given that this game works better as a casual game you return to once in a while, you’d better plant rice unless you are required otherwise because other crops would wither and rot if you do not collect them in time.

Click idle chestnut picker cooperative, lumber company, rubber tapper cooperative, cocoa cooperative or fishing cooperative and you are directed to a place where chestnuts, wood, rubber, cocoa, or fish can be collected. Those places need time to recover after collections and during that time, blue flags appear in those places indicating that they are not ready for another collection yet. As suggested in the game’s theme, you are advised to choose a different location for resource collection each time to ensure sustainable development of the village.

The game incorporates a pleasing energy system. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the energy refills quickly over time. You gain one energy point in about four minutes. Yes, about. The time varies depending on how many energy points you possess at the moment. When you run out of the energy, you will gain one point in 3 minutes and 55 seconds; otherwise the refill is longer. And when you level up, you will gain a full energy reward, not just full refill. That makes it often the case that your energy is larger than the maximum value of your present level.

The bright graphics are specially detailed sometimes. For example, there are even insects flying below the street lamps.

With integrative gameplay, always sufficient energy, and lovable graphics, Amazon Alive is the social simulation game freemium social game lovers probably want.