Tileset, by 
It’s Blade. And he has another tileset. Only this time, it’s different… the name is way too long. Let’s just call it “Islands” from now on. Blade does!
GRAPHIC QUALITY:
Blade retains a very consistant graphic style throughout the set, which is a good thing. The cannons and gold coins are going to look like they were drawn by the same person as the bridges and pirate flags. It’s all generally drawn in the fashion of a generic flash animation, but with a little more detail, and obviously somewhat smaller. Some stuff, like the treasure chest, and the pirate flag, ends up looking really awesome.
Unfortunately, that’s not always true. The cartoony flash animation look has one major side effect, and that side effect is a lack of shading. Textures in Islands are essentially two colors, one light and one dark. Of course, this only works in the case of fixed-size objects, a category the ground does not fit inside of. So the walls are one color with no texture at all. A gray color. And it looks bad. The sand on top of the walls is a lighter gray color, made better by the variety created by various small objects and pathways, but still a textureless fill tool. It generally looks annoying.
To improve the quality of the platforms, there are small pathways added, doubtless inspired by such impressive tilesets as HH98 and Townsville 1. They are the same color as the walls, and do not always manage to look 3D against the textureless sand, but are still a nice touch which more tilesets could use.
I want to clarify that for the most part, the shading does work. On smaller things like the fence posts, you don’t notice the hideous deficiency, and they look great. The barrels look fine with the three shades of brown. The hanging plants are iffy. But the wall sucks, and the sand is annoying, and the caves aren’t too good, and the background makes me want to hide my eyes or at least stand inside of a cave area. Not a very good sign.
Pros: A lot of stuff looks great.
Cons: But on the bigger stuff, the lack of shading strikes back, and is the cause of great ugly. Especially with the background layers.
Rating: 7.2
MASKING:
Masking gets top marks, especially because this is such a complicated tileset. Everything comes in multiple variations when required, and all the slopes are well aligned with their connecting tiles. No jags anywhere. The only downside is the automasked background, which can cause annoyance for those who want to be inventive with the tileset.
Pros: Everything is perfect.
Cons: Automasked background.
Rating: 9.2
COLORS:
Unacceptable. This is the modern age of tilesets, and Blade seems not to have even a rudimentary grasp of tileset palettes. Nothing works. Poles don’t work, snow doesn’t work (it’s brown, which could be imagined as falling sand, but the shading is wrong), pinball doesn’t work, it’s a beach tileset and the water doesn’t work! And there’s no textured background!
Fortunately, the colors actually used by the tiles of the tileset are better. Everything is more or less about the same level of saturation, so your eyes are unlikely to hurt, unless you’re looking at layer 8. There is a definite color scheme – gray is ground, green and blue are background, brown is decoration – which is maintained all through the tileset and limits confusion. The gray is a bit boring, unfortunately.
Pros: Working color scheme, no glaring inconsistencies, stuff works together.
Cons: Boring ground, tileset seems to have used the Remap Tileset Palette button.
Rating: 7.0
VARIETY:
If your favorite subject is variety, this tileset is your dream. There are scads of bits and pieces of eyecandy strewn throughout the tileset. Grass, pathways, barrels, bridges, distant islands, pirate ships, flags, poles, netting, rocks, plants, treasure… I could go on. There is tons of stuff to be found here. The tileset may be slightly less pleasing to those who enjoy making new and different unintended environments, but there are a number of interesting looking things (the netting looks quite promising), so I won’t rule out that possibility. As mentioned in masking, there are variations of tiles to fulfill different purposes, and lots of objects can appear with all sorts of backgrounds. Even the caves, I’m pleased to report, don’t need to be placed in layer 5. But the animations are slightly lacking (the pirate flag is the only one you’ll notice without looking closely), so levels may look somewhat dead.
Pros: Lots and lots of stuff!
Cons: No actual pirate ship to roam around in, but I guess the tileset is pretty big already. Maybe a TSF edition. Only one main type of platform (the sand).
Rating: 8.8
TILE PLACEMENT:
Um. Well. He, uh, tried.
Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the tileset is arranged fairly intuitively. Most of the cool eyecandy tiles to place on the ground are all in the same place, the tileset is recognizably divided into, uh, divisions, and things generally connect well. The background eyecandy area is a little iffy, but it should be possible to piece together.
Unfortunately, all the careful order comes apart where it matters the most, in the formation of the ground. It would take a long time of staring morbidly at the tileset before I’d attempt to piece something together, and it still might be using reference from the example level. Various pieces of wall are thrown together with no connecting tiles nearby, leaving little more than a jumble of tiles which use approximately three colors total (four with transparency). If a few eyecandy tiles could have been sacrificed to make the layout more intuitive, that might have been a good thing.
Pros: Most things are put together well, logical division.
Cons: The wall fails my inspection. Or maybe my inspection fails. I’m not sure which.
Rating: 7.0
OVERALL: I want to like Islands. Its a Blade tileset. It uses ideas I’ve had for a while and puts them to good effect. But something went wrong with the shading, and the tileset needs to be blindly fumbled together, to the point where I don’t think I’d ever use the set. (Before anyone complains, I have used Blade tilesets before. I used Forest. Twice. And Aztec!)
I would indeed suggest that you download it. It’s a great example of what tilesets can be if people put some work into them. It’s a great tileset to LOOK at. It’s the sort of thing you might find in a game. I can’t imagine putting this much effort into a tileset. It just didn’t all work out perfectly in the end, that’s all.
Pros: Very good underlying idea, enormous amount of effort seems to have been spent, uncommon theme, lots of variety in eyecandy, excellent masking, generally a well thought out and produced tileset.
Cons: Not my graphics style, too many unshaded surfaces, complicated theme leads to complicated tileset.
Rating: 8.1
