Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City

Though I'm often accused of being lazy, in reality I merely appreciate the slower side of life.

There's something to be said for kicking back and taking things into your stride rather than running around all day, Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City most definitely taking a page out of that book.

While the task at hand - building a new civilisation almost from scratch - might seem a rather mighty one, its pace is disappointingly just as pedestrian as its predecessors.

This is a thinking man's game, not designed for those spare five minutes, but rather one tailored to fill whole afternoons, even though little actually happens.

The plot focuses on the discovery of an ancient and desolate city after the game's miniature adventurers go in search of new land to accommodate their expanding empire. Most of your early moves concern constructing the fundamentals of life, dropping a character near twigs and dry reeds, for instance, causing them to make a fire.

While you can never actively tell them what to do, your influence essentially guides your people forward. Pressing a finger down on a character, sliding to the desired location, and finally letting them go near an interactive object motivates them to take action.

Pushing members of the opposite sex together will often result in reproduction, for example. Every task you give a follower trains them in that particular skill, those who build or repair gaining a long-term aptitude for such tasks. It's a step-by-step framework that gives Virtual Villagers its longevity. The joy comes from watching the population flourish after you've given them a hefty helping hand.

Yet, despite a few cosmetic changes here and there, this is the same game as was offered in the last instalment, The Lost Children. While it's unfair to criticise Virtual Villagers for being too plodding - the slow pace is, after all, its lifeblood - that this third iteration carries no significant changes or additions to gameplay is a sign that the series is beginning to stall.

Simply putting the same formula to work in a new, albeit beautifully animated, setting isn't really enough to justify the existence of this third outing. Unless you're literally after more of the same, there's simply no reason to pick this up over the previous releases. Virtual Villagers 2 is less than a year old, cheaper, and at the time a grand step forward for the franchise.

This follow-up sadly offers no such headway, the whole package struggling to distance itself from what's gone before. Though adequate enough for newcomers with money to burn, Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City feels less like an expansion of the series are more like an attempt to cash in on its following in quick time.