Overview: While not the first treasure-hunting game (see our review of Treasure Madness, Zynga brings its usual polish to the type. Treasure Isle reuses several systems and art assets to make a fleshed-out treasure hunting game that, based on its rapid rise in popularity, appears to be incredibly captivating.

The basic premise is that you click on places on an island to dig up treasures, spending Energy to do so. Your energy recovers slowly, but you can boost it by finding fruit or persuading friends to send you energy packs. Completing treasure collections gives you a bonus and leveling up opens up new equipment, decorations, and maps.

The decorations go on your own personal island. Most of the decorations have no purpose other than to look adorable, but the island comes with a few garden plots to grow your own Energy-boosting fruit (obviously courtesy of Farmville) and a “gem tree”. The gems it drops are required to unlock certain areas of certain maps – but you only get one type of gems from your tree. To get the others, you need to make friends and visit their trees, or spend Island Cash (the real-money currency) to get bags of gems.

This is another visit-occasionally game – the energy regen is quite slow, and you’ll only get to play in short bursts. But the concept is sound, the execution is polished, and overall it’s definitely worth trying out. (The jaunty Hawaiian music and cries of seabirds are worth a brief mention – well done. I enjoyed them thoroughly before I turned off the sound entirely.)

6/24/2010: Fire God Mountain Review