Paradise Life: New game feels a bit too familiar to be a paradise

Ice Break Games seem to be creating better and better games with each effort. Their first title, Ranch Life, never really took off. Their second game, Cafe Life, currently has almost 2.7 million monthly players. Now they're trying again with Paradise Life, a game that feels just a little too familiar to Zynga's FrontierVille to be declared an innovative success for social games.

Paradise Life is literally FrontierVIlle on an island setting. You have your own island, and on it you have to clear the growth, harvest plants, build structures, fish from ponds, and even defeat villains in the exact same way as FrontierVille. You have your energy meter which controls all actions within the game, your food meter which allows you to buy meals from the store (which convert into energy), favor points (such as reputation in FrontierVille) that are awarded for helping on your friend's islands, a questing system the follows the template FrontierVille has created, family members and the ability to unlock them, collections, wishlists, you name it. In fact, some of the interfaces are so similar that it's a blatant copy of Zynga's hit wild west game.
Paradise Life

Zynga have received such a bad reputation in the past for cloning other games by smaller developers and making them into huge successes. It's actually kind of ironic to see the same thing happening right back at Zynga to FrontierVille, which was Zynga's first original design. However, it remains to be seen if Paradise Life will prove to be a success for Ice Break Games, as it doesn't appear to do anything to better Zynga's design. Zynga's success has come from taking the ideas that other people come up with and making them more polished and better suited to a social game audience. Paradise Life is clearly an identical clone with a fresh island setting.


Don't get us wrong, the game is cute and well done. It's polished more than Cafe LIfe, and feels really great to play. The avatars are very cute, the colors are bright and inviting, and it's so much of an exact copy of FrontierVille that we're sure it will see some residual success because of that. However where games like Ravenwood Fair have iterated on a successful design like FrontierVille and made a new unique fresh-feeling game, we can't help but feel like Paradise LIfe brings very little of worth to our selection of games to play.