Club Penguin Island
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 Apparently, Disney didn't realize that charging people to play a rushed MMORPG clone would lead to severe repercussions.
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Club Penguin Island was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by Disney Canada and published by Disney Mobile for Android, iOS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. It was the successor of Club Penguin and released worldwide on March 29, 2017. The game's public beta testing period took place in Australia and New Zealand from December 15, 2016, and in Canada from January 13, 2017, to its release date. The gameplay was similar to that of the original Club Penguin, though it ran on the game engine Unity rather than Adobe Flash Player.
On September 27, 2018, an official news post was posted announcing that Club Penguin Island would be closing down by the end of the year. The servers closed down on December 20, 2018. Offline Mode, which would allow players to continue playing the game in a limited form after the closure of the servers, was made available the next day.
Why It Wasn't an Adventure
- Microtransactions: The game offered a paid membership subscription, and without one the game becomes boring and dull. Lacking membership makes you unable to buy and share party supplies, collect exclusive items, access unlimited clothing creation, and use gear (with the exception of the Jackhammer but jack hammer is only used in the context of specific missions).
- However, the game did offer a free seven-day membership trial but you couldn't start it without entering your credit card details. If you didn't cancel the membership early enough, you would have been automatically charged the membership fee after those seven days.
- It cloned many other MMO games, such as Pirate 101 and Monkey Quest (which shut down on September 26, 2014), making it not stand out among these much better titles.
- Quests that boiled down to collecting a few items and running back to the quest-giver; they were nothing more than fetch quests.
- A poorly executed leveling system that had the player unlock things as they level up. It inspired other mediocre games like BlockStarPlanet to do the same thing.
- It lacked a lot of features that the original Club Penguin had. Most notably the Puffles, which were one of the biggest things in the original. This is because the game ended up closing before they had time to introduce several things such as Puffles and Card-Jitsu.
- The paper-thin plot. While Club Penguin had paper-thin plots, they were passable as the game was not entirely focused on them.
- Club Penguin was discontinued in favor of this, and Disney does not want anyone trying to bring back the original experience.
- The developers kept releasing unnecessary parties rather than focusing on the features the players wanted, like Puffles.
- Most of the soundtrack was recycled from the original Club Penguin.
- Getting banned for either saying harmless words or for no apparent reason was easy.
- Excessive amounts of glitches.
- Terrible amounts of lag that could sometimes crash the game, especially on Android devices.
- At launch, the game looked unfinished.
- The game tried to be hip and cool with the kids by having an emote called "Check it" on the Quick Chat feature which allowed the player to dab.
Redeeming Qualities
- From an economic standpoint, the game's existence can be justified. Club Penguin was suffering from a low fanbase at the time, Adobe Flash was getting outdated, and it was costing way too much to continue maintenance.
- While the multiplayer and online elements are no longer available, Offline Mode allows players to continue playing the game after the servers closed. It also allows players to access the Debug Mode and change the appearance of the island.
- Disney attempted to fix the damage caused by the membership by adding more new things to it (examples include igloos, and more areas to explore like Mt. Blizzard and Island Central).
- The graphics are pretty nicely made, and are quite nice to look at, and are much better than the original game, since the penguin models no longer looked like triangular penguins.
- The PC port of the game runs more fluid and stable than the mobile version.
- Despite most of the soundtrack being reused from Club Penguin, there were some good songs including "Epic Island", "The Perfect Day", and "Brightest Days", which are pretty good to listen to.
- The voice acting is decent.
- At least it had one private server to maintain it: Waddle Penguins Island.
Reception
The game's announcement, along with the closure of the original Club Penguin on March 30, 2017, had upset many fans of the original.
Club Penguin Island garnered mostly negative user reviews upon its worldwide release, with players criticizing mainly the membership, and the lack of things to do as well. Also, many players criticized Disney's choice to discontinue the original.
However, after the shutdown, reception of the game has became more mixed, thanks to having infinite free membership now.
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