More Gameplay

It’s not a duck, it’s a chicken

One big selling point of Creature Isle is that your creature can have its own creature named Tyke. Your creature takes care of Tyke just like you take care of your creature. He’ll teach Tyke miracles, and how to treat villagers. Your creature will reflect whatever you teach it – if you want Tyke to be benevolent to the villagers then your creature needs to be good too. You can’t directly interact with Tyke, only your creature can.

Tyke is another feature in Creature Isle that I just don’t understand the appeal of. There’s a small factor of, “cool my creature has a pet,” but beyond that, Tyke is useless. There are no villages you need to fight over, so Tyke doesn’t help you with that. He can’t fight other creatures. He does help the villagers, but you don’t need two creatures to do that. What is his purpose? You can’t even eat him if your creature is hungry.

Sickly child

Barrel sniping

The Tiger is a good fighter

Tyke can actually get in the way of your creature during trials. In one trial your creature needs to destroy some buildings. He’ll cast miracles, throw rocks, or stomp on the buildings. The first time I tried this, my creature cast fireballs to destroy some of the buildings. Tyke sees a burning building and thinks that he needs to save it, so he casts water and douses the fire, causing my creature to lose the trial. Since you can’t interact with Tyke, you can’t tell him to not interfere with the trials, and that concept is way out of reach for your creature to teach to him. The only thing you can do is stick him in the “Tyke Daycare” or what I like to call it, “Get the Hell Out of the Way You KFC Reject”.

Temptation Island

Another lauded feature of Creature Isle is the ability for your creature to fall in love with another creature. Unfortunately, you don’t teach your creature how to pick up chicks at a bar. There’s no “best pick-up line” trial. There are not even any female creatures wandering about the island to hit on. I won’t spoil the game completely, but the love aspect is barely there. Of course, I’m not sure if this is such a bad thing, because hot animal nookie isn’t something I really need to see in a game.

King Kong?

Slow-mo knockout

Losers

Finally, Creature Isle is very short. It contains less than 10 hours of actual gameplay, or around 20 if you need to spend a lot of time training a new creature. There’s only one island (the original had five), no conflicts, and a very thin storyline. Twenty hours is the average length of an expansion pack that sells for $20-30, but given the nature of the childish mini-games, it’s hard to say Creature Isle is long enough.