Ikariam is an odd one. Not just because of the way it’s chosen to be a Civilization-styled title in a MMO market dominated by RPGs, but in the way it has chosen to be that. There are a lot of odd design decisions.

The most obvious first -- the complete inability to stack building projects. Want to build a trading post upgrade, then a hideout, and then a embassy? Well, you’d better be prepared to log back in each time you want the next object built, because your townsfolk can’t be given a list of things to do.

I can see why they did it -- without this restriction, the beginning stage of the game would consist of setting up your townsfolk a huge list of things to build, and then coming back in a few days once they’d done it all. But even then -- why is it fun, or at all interesting, to have to build all of these essential buildings anyway? There are few (if any!) you can get away without building, so in your first town at least it’s a slog to get to the point where you can play the game.

This is made slightly worse by the complete lack of any usable tutorial -- in the end I simply resorted to using the beginner's guide on Wikariam, which details, by and large, roughly the only way to progress in the early stages of the game. The initial Ikariam experience is complex enough that I’m sure it puts most casual players off.

Once you get over that hurdle though there’s a strange sort of addictiveness to the basic play -- trading and mining materials to build and improve your city (and, indeed, your empire, once you’ve reached the point where you can colonize other islands.)

But notably, there isn’t very much drive to interact with other players inherent with the game. It does have an economic model based around trading and pillaging which is at least slightly interesting, and there is both power and meaning from taking part in trade agreements and alliances, but it’s very unlikely that you will “socialize” with them at all. Certainly in the early stages, when it comes to trading, you may as well be trading with NPCs.

Now, a game doesn’t have to have socialization as an important part of its gameplay to be a virtual world (and in its way, Ikariam very definitely is a virtual world) but it’s rather interesting how quiet a world it is despite all of the hustle and bustle of trading.

Not to say that Ikariam isn't a good game -- one that is very addictive even if you’re only able to spare a few minutes each day to play. I’m not sure if GameForge have a particularly excellent handle on why it is good though, nor how to improve it. As the game continues to have basic interface flaws, they recently began offering an Ikariam Plus premium account, a new interface upgrade that you can pay for on a weekly basis.

It’s only of particular use to high level players, unfortunately, and also doesn’t fix any of the most obvious problems (like not being able to list orders in advance). In addition, they’ve created Ikariam Plus bonuses, which allow players to pay some real cash to receive some instant bonuses to their trading values of specific luxuries for a week or so.

This is a genuinely weird decision as it unbalances the game somewhat -- unlike many developers who have sworn that their paid-for content isn’t going to allow some players an unfair advantage, and this very definitely does, and seems like something less useful to players in general than the aforementioned interface changes.

But Ikariam soldiers on. Though its social aspects are underdeveloped the game’s economics make it a virtual world of interest, and it’s a very playable game. And in particular, by choosing to do things differently, it opens up the virtual world market to gamers who wouldn’t normally be interested in the genre, and for that reason has a place here.