In what sense do you consider them “good”? The likelihood is these will be worthless in terms of SEO.
Again, in what sense are they “decent”? Since you consider forum and directory links to be “good”.
The fact they have apparently sprung up overnight for a new site that is currently hard for people to find looks suspicious to me.
Some info on 301s and Page rank:-
It doesn’t make any sense at all to favour one region specific tld over another, except perhaps in the context of a search for local services within that particular region. Hence the question:-
Hint: If the answer is “no”, the .io tld is not relevant.