Royal Envoy sets you in the role of a city planner/architect appointed by the king to rebuild Islandshire from a devastating natural disaster prior to the next rainy season so that the kingdom still gets all the wonderful goods that they produce (like the King’s favorite shoes). To do this you must travel level-by-level and island-by-island sorting out the various problems and solving the various puzzles that await.

At first I thought it was like Diner Dash with Sim City elements, and it is. But it also incorporates the resource gathering aspect of the RTS genre. You have two types of employees, workers and tax collectors. The tax collectors obviously gather up money for you and the workers do all the heavy lifting of building things, digging up treasure, removing obstacles and cutting lumber for building production. It’s an intricate scheme at times but with it’s simple point and click interface it’s no bother to manage.

That’s not to say that the levels aren’t challenging. Each has a timer running and beating the level before the time runs out earns you a gold star. An island full of gold stars earns you a trophy. You also get a score per level which raises your level though this has no bearing on the game at all, it’s just another goal to strive for.

At times I am astounded by the production values that Playrix is able to put into a downloadable, $19.95 game. Royal Envoy is another title from them that exceeded expectations. From the great visuals to the great sound and the interesting gameplay it, like Gardenscapes, Fishdom  and others, is quickly addictive and hard to put down. In fact before writing the review I had already played through 20 levels which had consumed some fair amount of time. There are over 90 levels in all and 8 bonus quests.