Island Sanctuary starts off great and looks amazing and I think they're were actually on to something, but ended up designing backwards.

It feels like the developers started off by making an amazing looking island, then thought to themselves "players won't do this unless we reward them". So they added a vendor with a list of rewards. Then they needed a way to make us grind for those rewards, so they developed their robot factory system where we could set up an industrial island to produce the required currency. And they called it a day there.

They're so off the mark. I wasn't even expecting lots of rewards from this, I just wanted it to be fun. It feels like "How can we make this lots of fun?" wasn't even the focus, just the practicalities of reward and grind and the entire island designed around that structure. Where's the minigames, customization, fun interactions?