Ice Cream Island War

"Ice Cream Island War" is a turn-based strategy RPG developed by Delsin7 using SRPG Studio and was created as part of the Seasons of RMN II event that tasked people with creating a game based on season. The only caveat is if they participated in previous Seasons of RMN event they couldn't build a game around the same season. In the case of this game it's themed around an eternal summer that is destroying the lands of ice and snow. So the only way to reunite the two kingdoms is for Jimothay, the Ice Prince, to force the Cream Kingdom into submission with a small band of elite troops and force the Cream Princess to accept him as her husband. After all, the best relationships are built around forcing your partner into submission, right?



At any rate this game is meant to be comedic so your not meant to take the game seriously. Sadly this lack of seriousness doesn't make combat any more bearable in my opinion. This is because combat is so broken in this game if you actually spend any time on investigating the Ice King's castle, acquire the dancer, and conquer the arena. The reason the Ice King's castle breaks the game is because you can acquire a sword for the main character that has an infinite number of uses. The dancer helps break the game since she allows your prince to attack twice in a single turn and most enemies in this game are level one. So this means Jimothay will quickly reach a level that allows him to one-shot enemies. And in most fights you'll be approached by small groups of two or three enemies. So being able to attack twice means you can tear them a new butthole before they can even try to attack you. While the game does offer you additional party members like a crazy girl that hates elves and so on, but these characters aren't actually needed in order to beat the game. In fact, the main utility I found for some of them was to be cannon fodder to distract the final boss.

Another issue that undermines this game is that many maps in this game are absolutely huge which means you'll either be skipping a lot of your turns and using the left click to speed up the enemies approach in order to save on time. Or you'll be forced to slowly tread through levels in this game as you try to deal with the enemies. And the slow march through a massive map isn't even entirely avoidable since you need to conquer a tower at one point in this game that has multiple floors with enemies on them. And you don't gain the ability to move quickly in this dungeon until you've defeated all of them. So if your a weird sucker for opening every chest like I am. You'll find the slog to get through this area extremely tiring. After all, it took me the better part of an episode in my Let's Play to conquer this place. As for how to improve it I'd suggest making each floor it's own stage. That way the player can move much quicker through the tower. Plus it's really annoying trying to move the prince and other characters up the various floors considering the game auto targets the prince when you begin your turn. So if you have him descend or ascend a set of stairs it can be a pain to relocate anyone else that is moving with him and send them up or down the stairs after him. I suppose the best option would be to move him last, but considering I was moving him with the frail dancer. It made a lot more sense for him to enter potentially dangerous areas first.

On the plus side once you've defeated the enemies in most areas your free to move your characters an infinite number of squares in order to open up the remaining chests in a given map. And the use of the word most is in there because this didn't work in the ruins with the science lab for some reason.

On the graphical and sound side of things the game appears to rely on the default assets that come with SRPG Studio. At least that appears to be the case since most of the assets utilized in this game I've seen used in other games made with this engine. Which makes people asking me to pay for their terrible turn-based SRPGs on Steam even more unbearable.

And the final nail in this game's coffin in my opinion is that the jokes are few and far to spread out for their own good. As a result the game doesn't even feel that much like a comedy game. Even though it contains lines about "fairy dairymothers".



In conclusion "Ice Cream Island War" is a comedic game that isn't that amusing in my opinion. A turn-based SRPG whose battle system is so easily broken it makes battles boring. And since those battles are mind numbingly easy it feels like Delsin7 took the strategy out of SRPG. At the same time I do recognize that this an event game and expecting Delsin7 to get the combat balance right in such a project is a big ask. On the other hand this game has gone through multiple revisions since the contest was finished. And you think one of those revisions would have made the game more challenging or at least resulted in small maps so the player could quickly smite the enemies in an area and move onto the next scene so the game's pace could at least make the comedy more effective. And don't even get me started on the game ending on sequel bait of all things.