Each member of your crew has different strengths and can become an asset when applied effectively: Some Explore well, others Produce, while some Build and still others Fight. The game's slick graphical interface presents each crewmember as a card that you can swipe onto appropriate tasks, which are completed once their progress bar has maxed. This is the part where we find out which of you read our reviews and who prefers to just start playing a title immediately. Ready? Regardless of how many crewmembers you assign to a task, each try at it requires a certain amount of time to accomplish. The length of these timers varies based on the task at hand — constructing buildings for example usually takes the longest. These timers can sometimes last for quite a while — nearly an hour for some tasks, with multiple attempts needed to complete it. Some readers are likely to call foul, decrying it as just an aggressive attempt to sell Gems. Those are the in-game currency bought with real money that can make these timers vanish, among other things like unlocking new characters, buying spiffy items and filling your stockpiles of resources. But we've found that if you tough it out, before too long the game provides you with a means of drastically reducing these timers a few times per day allowing for almost normal play. Tinker Island will readily save your games to the cloud, and doesn't demand that you're online in order to play it. This free survival game features a massive landscape with enough areas that it will take weeks to explore. Will you be able to sort out what's going on with this eerie island and make it back home?

Tinker Island (Android, Android Tablet)

Tinker Island (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad)