Starsand Island Switch 2 Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
As someone who loves cozy games, I’ve spent a lot of my What’s It Like working hours in different genres lately, so when I was given the chance to return to cozy comfort gaming with Starsand Island, I jumped at the chance! But will this keep me engaged and relaxed or be a designing disaster? What’s it like? Grab your hats, pull out your tools and get your Blueprints ready as we review Starsand Island on Nintendo Switch 2.
Starsand Island begins with an instantly relatable scene of a girl standing in an elevator full of corporate people wearing black, wishing for a colourful, lively island with sand, waves, sunshine and happiness. Colour me intrigued. Character selection of Starsand Island has a lot of variety, and all the outfits are fairly cute. The background is that you have been away for years and are finally returning home to restore the old house.
You are quickly greeted by your childhood friend, and the mechanics of the game are introduced. The worktable reminded me of one I’d seen before, in Everdream Valley almost exactly, and you’ll find a lot of the items to be a repeat of other cozy farming sims that have come before it, like crafting tools, furniture and collecting materials. You can also decorate your house, but where Starsand Island differs is that it has a whole in-depth building system for designing your house. There are pre-designed, simple, medium and complex builds you are given a preview of and collecting the materials for them looked to be quite in-depth. Looking through your phone, there are also clearly a lot of collections for you to complete, and I was struck by how Starsand Island really embraces the cute girl culture of make-up and outfits while also preparing you for the grand home design of a woman. As a woman who has always erred on the side of being comfortable, wearing minimal make-up and considering myself more practical/stoic, aka boring, I’ve always admired other women and their ability to dress gorgeously and maintain make-up looks while still living their best lives and maintaining their femininity. Starsand Island really gave me that feel that my character would be one of the latter types, and I was so excited to see how the world evolves.
Starsand Island has you completing quests through the community board, levelling up different professions with quests, building relationships with townsfolk and stray animals, pet adoption, raising animals, farming and managing crops, cooking, crafting items and patterns, exploring forests, decorating and overall sets itself out to be one of the most in-depth cosy games I’ve seen in a long time with huge possibilities. There are building mechanics where you can craft and design your own house from floor to ceiling, furniture sets, decorations, adorable clothing and toon customisation.
Items are interesting and range from mushrooms, soft wood and rocks you pick up everywhere to more in-depth items like sheep spit and High-Performance Wire, which had me wondering what they would eventually be used for. The machinery is also interesting, with items that range from a furnace, a feed creator, a Gear Smith, up to a juicer and a teleporter. There is also weaponry that you use on your playthrough through the forest, but overall there weren’t really any fights that were too hard; all seemed to be one mob at a time, and as long as you could dodge and shoot a slingshot or later a bow and arrow with bomb arrows, they were fairly easy to progress past. Making the gameplay feel really accessible to most age groups. There is also a multiplayer option that looked intriguing; you could choose the region that suited you best, and it looked like you would be rewarded for time spent in multiplayer with its own currency that you could use to buy items. However, I was unable to access this during my time with the game. There are storylines like the development of the town. Expansion of your property and the possibility to buy an island.
I spent time meeting the townsfolk who were all quite enchanting and had a few that looked to be intriguing romance options. The map is also deceptively large, and I had a couple of times where I thought I’d explored the place only to find that I’d missed a road and would find a whole other area, like a giant Temple Complex, and the Panda area. There was treasure hidden throughout the map, so the game does reward your exploration. Travelling is also cool in the game; at first you are cruising around on a skateboard, which later becomes customisable with art, then you are lent a scooter to ride around on, then you are instructed to construct roller blades, but you are eventually given animals that you could hire to ride around on for 48hours. When you progress further in the game, and some of your animals mature, you are also able to ride them, and when you have enough money, you could also purchase vehicles or the blueprints for them to make them yourself.
However, just as I was getting into the game, things started to unravel. Loading screens took ages to load and were having lag spikes, then when I finally loaded in, things were quite blurry. The skateboard ollied for no particular reason and had quite an irritating sound effect, and I had the most map fall-throughs while riding on a mount called Pyrox that has an electric stomp, which was very cool for the quick collection of fibre, but less so on my 3rd fall-through.
Unfortunately, it flies too close to the sun and completely mucks it up. There was not one section of the game that wasn’t glitched out in some way or another. The developers have acknowledged that the Switch 2 port has a lot of issues, and they are working on patching this, but we have to give you a review on the game in its current state, which is what you would be purchasing off the e-shop. Starsand Islands’ performance was buggy to say the least. There is a lot of stutter on the camera pan. I also had some issues with button selection; for instance, when holding L and selecting up on my D pad, it just didn’t want to open my bag. I could get past this by just manually going to the phone and selecting the bag, but it was annoying to not have the shortcut working. There was also a delay in your character presenting items. You’d collect an item, walk a step and then she’d realise she found something new, turn around and present information on it. An odd quirk to be sure.
The graphics of Starsand Island are bright and vibrant, the characters are cute and in anime style, and the whole map has a relaxing Island vibe with chill music. Walking around the island, you can clearly see the Japanese origins with the playgrounds, grocery stores, Cherry Blossoms and Temples. Each store is engaging and ranges from a corner store to a large but simple Aquarium on the wharf. There are relaxing rivers, mystical mushroom groves, and a huge Moonlit forest to explore. However, there is also a lot of asset pop-in that is constantly jarring, and shadows are a bit pixelated. I also kept finding glitches such as four people standing in one spot. People standing in tables. The same person appearing 3 times on the screen, walking in different directions.
On my playthrough, there were also a few game crashes, which was particularly frustrating as there was a lot of progress lost and I had to go through 2 loading screens to get back in. Then, when I did get in, my whole day’s progress had been lost and all the machinery I created on previous days had disappeared. Along with this, I was convinced there wasn’t an in-game menu, but after the crash the menu suddenly started working, and I could finally see save, settings, support, etc. Because I like to give games a fair go, I continued to play and crafted a new kiln and furnace. And the game ran smoothly for quite a period of time (with the pop-in still occurring). Oddly, I played another two days in game and spent a night in the mines, and when I came back, my machines were back, hurrah! But I could no longer pat my rabbits. I guess there has to be some give and take. Eventually my rabbits sorted themselves out, and I was able to continue, but these types of glitches continued right up till I posted this review.
There were also times I accidentally fell through the level, but with ominous foresight, the developers already had a button in the settings for unsticking yourself. However, hitting unstick sometimes put me into another situation I had to be unstuck from. However, the game does have an addictive quality, and I found myself having a hard time putting it down regardless of the glitches. But I was finally persuaded to give it up around the 20-hour mark. By then I’d built a lot of the machines, could see there were more to come, expanded my farm once, unlocked 80% of the forest and had the keys to continue, then one day, for no reason at all, all my tools and crop patches just disappeared, and I couldn’t bring myself to restart it another time.
For my designers looking into accessibility options, there is the ability to reduce screen shake, turn off motion blur, isolate different audio sources and remap some of the buttons. But as always, I recommend further research to see if Starsand Island suits your accessibility needs. At just under $42AUD, Starsand Island is a hard sell in its current state.
Starsand Island on Nintendo Switch 2 is a game that I really wanted to love, and that has all the bones of an exceptional game, but its distinct lack of optimisation stops it from achieving that result. Starsand Island has a lot of potential, but unfortunately, it also has a lot of bugs and glitches that make it nigh on impossible to play. It’s a game that teased me with the possibilities it offered, but it just left me hanging… literally and figuratively. We are looking forward to seeing how this game ends up in the future, and we will update you when the patches arrive.
So, What’s it like? Starsand Island is like Sims meets Animal Crossing but with a lot less polish.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.
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