Last updated on December 11th, 2025 at 12:53 pm
Pico Islands – Strategy Game Review
Pico Islands is a Strategy/Simulation game from BitSpree GmbH, first launched in 16th November 2019.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 132+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Pico Islands Stand Out
You have landed on a small island with a group of settlers. As the new king of this land it is now up to you to enlarge your realm and lead your people to glory. Capture the resources of this world and let your small village grow to a respectable city. Trade with your neighbors, capture gold and diamonds with your conquests. Eventually you will cross the sea to conquer many more islands and fortify the domination of your civilization and discover the many secrets beyond the ocean.
The real time strategy game Pico Islands is an economy simulation taking place in a medieval world. In the quest for prosperity you can pursue the conquest of the whole world or simply lean back and watch your townsmen bustle around. The game is self-explanatory and does not require knowledge of the English language.
Features:
- By effective placement of your buildings and a well organized network of tracks and roads you will optimize the productivity of your settlers.
- Use the right tactics and strategies in building your town to use the natural resources of your land the most effective way.
- Collect lumber and stone as building materials for your constructions.
- Place tracks and roads for optimized transportation of your goods.
- Produce grain in your farms, only with a working agriculture your bakers can provide bread for your citizens, while your fishermen supply your sailors with sufficient food.
- Let your alchemists brew magical potions that will lead your way to the discovery of new technologies.
- Provide your miners with sufficient food, the mines will produce stone, coal, iron, copper and of course gold which serve as crafting materials for your manufactories.
- Build harbors to cross the seas with your ships and become a formidable conqueror
- Forge tools, jewelry and swords that your sailors and knights will use to explore new islands, to trade or to pillage.
Enter the fantasy world of Pico Islands now and become a fearless adventurer, an acclaimed leader, a formidable conqueror and the hero of your own empire in this RTS game!
Do you like retro, tycoon, idle clicker or simulation games? Then you should take a look at Pico Islands!
You can download and play Pico Islands free of charge, but you have the opportunity to enhance your gaming experience with In-App-Purchases for real money.
Featuring music by Matthew Pablo
https://matthewpablo.com
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Pico Islands is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 15th February 2024
Recent improvements include:
Features
- Daily reward with gems and discounts
Improvements - Upgraded Qt to 5.15.16
Download & Availability
Pico Islands is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Surprisingly good for a mobile game, not as many ads as we wouldve thought.
We wish it could just progrees faster.
Only into the game a few hours. We did purchase the no ad version because we can see this being our new obsession as long as it continues to mature. Plus developers need income too! Some issues we are having 1). The learning curve was pretty steep and we are still lost on some purposes the different icons represent. We.e. Forester lookups result in 404 page errors. 2) Needs a graphics setting to lower power use. Even plugged in cannot keep up with the drain. Playing on 2021 ipad with up to date ios sytem. 3). App loses our purchase records. We can recover them but it is annoying. 4) would like to see a map id of some kind and a way to play specific maps. Power drain is the most concerning to us, tbh. As we get deeper into the game we will update this review. Edit. Still playing. We tapped an option about 10 map limit and cannot undo it? Otherwise last update seemed to help with power drain.
Lots of documents that, so far ate little help and $13 to remove ads? We dont think so. $3.99 maybe. We really wanted to like this game and its strange. They have lots of documentation but none of it helps with figuring out why to do what when. Pushing buttons is different from the why/when to push them. We have tried 4-5 times now and am no further along. $13 for that pleasure, we dont think so. And no updates in s year.
Only into the game a few hours. We did purchase the no ad version because we can see this being our new obsession as long as it continues to mature. Plus developers need income too! Some issues we are having 1). The learning curve was pretty steep and we are still lost on some purposes the different icons represent. We.e. Forester lookups result in 404 page errors. 2) Needs a graphics setting to lower power use. Even plugged in cannot keep up with the drain. Playing on 2021 ipad with up to date ios sytem. 3). App loses our purchase records. We can recover them but it is annoying. 4) would like to see a map id of some kind and a way to play specific maps. Power drain is the most concerning to us, tbh. As we get deeper into the game we will update this review.
Unintuitive, click roads and it destroys them instead of upgrading them? No clue how the functions work, no instructions, nothing. After 20 minutes of no progress, uninstalled.
Love the game it needs little help to make it great.
Love the game, a little difficult to get going but once you get it it becomes incredibly addictive and entertaining.
You did a good job on this game.
Interesting sequel to Picos school. The story has changed a lot, but the original spirit is still there. Great game, but be sure to check out the original, Picos school, too.
Interesting game, but bad tutorials and help documentation.
We enjoy it. Yes theres a learning curve but, to us that was part of what made us draw to it. We think the developers are on to something great here! Just a lil time and we know they will make great adjustments and make the game just that much better.
BUG: Pause the game or pause tree seeding while redeploying road.
Unplayable without an explanation.
The game says that gameplay is self-explanatory. That is a total lie! Ive played hundreds of games and still had absolutely no clue what to do. We hate games like this! DELETE.
This game deserves more credit. We love the game.
This game is incredibly enjoyable, even in its early stage of development. From what Ive seen, it was created by a two man team, which is shocking because although the graphics are simple, they are incredibly likable and cute. We cant wait until they have a tutorial and more flesh out the purpose of the game, but if you like colony builders, you will love this game.
Having a good time so far. Good luck guys.
Wish we had a little more control on the direction of the build so we can position roads differently. But overall very fun game to consume time as soon as you figure it out.
Started playing today and so far its great! Very simplistic design and the game play can get boring eventually but this is an alpha so for what it is now the game looks great. Active developers as well so hoping they will be doing cool updates! Only downside is the intro/tutorial phase was difficult. We had no idea what we were doing except for some pointing fingers for a while then that was it but once we started exploring and learning the game it got very fun and we were into it. Try it and you might enjoy it.
Its great we love it but it makes our iPhone 12 Pro Max over heat in less then 5 min of playing they need to fix this for it to be an amazing game.
As much as we would like to give this game more or to play it more the complete lack of any descriptions in any of the UI or menus gets a hard no from us. Gotta be able to understand what something is or how its works not this guess and pray system. Fix that and we will be back.
Even if this game were polished (which it is not), it would still not be worth the $13 unlock cost. Im not averse to buying our games; in fact, we only play premium (not freemium) games. It just cant compete with other games in its price range. If this game were offered for desktop systems, it would never sell at that price. Ill leave it on our device, however, and occasionally launch it to see if the dev has come to his senses on the pricing of the ad-free version. Until then, it will sit in our purgatory folder where it belongs. Lastly, It seems likely that the price is intentionally prohibitive because the dev prefers ad revenue, which is unfortunate. We never play games with ads so hes not making anything off of us and those like us.
You cant start the game without allowing the app to track other apps. What kind of greedy psychopath does that.
We would give it a 5 out of 5 if there were better instructions cuz when you first join the game there are only pictures and arrows pointing at stuff. In general its a fun game and when you understand the mechanics you would enjoy it.
This is an amazingly fun little game. Unfortunately people are right, the first Playthru is to try to learn how to play. Theres not a lot of descriptions just icons in here to figure out what they are what benefit you get. The other issue is that it cost $13 to Remove ads. Honestly we like this game enough that we would think $9.99 wouldve been fair. The 13 is asking for a little too much. That said it was written very well and is very fun. We would love to see an endgame at it.
Needs instructions and $13 to remove ads? We dont think so. $3.99 maybe.
Needs one thing. When moving to an island, put a pop up that says ur progress will be lost so idiots like us dont do it and rage quit. But Ill do it all again, armed with our new knowledge about the game.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 24.01.102
- Size: 101.75 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN, DE
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: BitSpree GmbH
Last updated: 15th February 2024 | Genre: Strategy, Simulation | Developer: BitSpree GmbH