Survival and crafting games have been all the rage since Minecraft first graced our screens in 2011, and there’s something so fun about building and crafting away to create the stronghold of your dreams. Many games have followed a similar premise only to be often unfairly labeled as Minecraft clones. YLands aims to buck this trend by offering an adventure narrative with a complex crafting system. What’s it Like? Get your adventuring hat on, prepare to sail, and don’t forget the schematics as we review Ylands for Nintendo Switch.
Ylands starts off with an Indiana Jones-style adventure that acts as the tutorial, delving through a tomb and snowy wastelands to become an adventurer in the Classy Adventurers Guild. It’s a little clunky and awkward with both animations and controls, but persevering will allow you to be granted your own ship to sail the (kind of) open-world seas of Ylands. Despite the jank, the game does set an interesting premise right off the bat and then dashes it by taking everything away and then leaving you to your own devices, stranding you on an island to rebuild an inferior ship and figure things out for yourself. It was a bit jarring to go from an objective-based introduction to the game saying “There you go” and leaving you be.
The gameplay then dissolves into a barrage of “craft this” prompts that tend to swamp you. Initially, the first goal is to rebuild your ship by gathering materials and unlocking schematics, which is actually an interesting crafting system, allowing you to branch into different tech trees, allowing you to prioritizing your construction prowess to suit the sort of game you want Ylands to be. It does fall flat in some areas, like survival elements are non-existent, and food can restore health but that’s about it. Once you rebuild your boat, the game opens up, only to reveal that, unlike the seas of the game, Ylands is a bit shallow, allowing you to select an island to explore and nothing much else.
This is where the technical cracks start to show in the game as you then have to deal with extensive loading screens and terrible performance. Loading in can be measured in minutes, and then once you do load in the engine chugs along as it does its best to load assets. Once you are on the island, performance balances out for a while, only to chug again when exploring. This makes playing the game rather tedious, along with repeated crashes to the home screen. Sometimes, the game simply freezes for 5 seconds or more while loading. Combat and controls are difficult and clunky, and combat is frustrating and awkward. This is a shame since the intricate and comprehensive tech tree shows a lot of promise, as well as the core gameplay mechanics which help elevate its premise above being written off as a Minecraft clone.
Graphically, the polygonal art style looks good, and despite having some grainy textures, Ylands looks quite nice, especially in handheld mode on the OLED. There are a few UI issues, with the scaling going off-screen, and it can be difficult to navigate the menus at times. The environments are varied and if it wasn’t held back by the range of technical issues, would be quite fun to explore. For my vision-impaired explorers, there are no accessibility options, so I recommend further research to decide if Ylands is a good fit for you.
At just under $38 dollars, it’s a hard sell to recommend Ylands on the Nintendo Switch. Sure, the majority of the content is included that you have to purchase on the PC version which is free to play, but in its current state, it needs a few more updates which would significantly improve the game’s score. There are some uninspired outfits and items you can purchase that are similar to Lego Fortnite’s construction items in the in-game DLC shop. I should note that there have been 2 updates since its launch, but these haven’t done much to reduce the excessive load times or jittery performance during gameplay. As of the time of this article going live, it seems Ylands has been temporarily pulled from the E-shop as well.
As we sail into the sunset of this review, Ylands is an interesting concept with an intricate crafting system. The core mechanics and features are fantastic, but the execution and performance marr what could be a brilliant game with clunky and unintuitive controls as well as lengthy load times and performance issues. I have no doubt that with further optimisation, Ylands would be an excellent contender for your attention with its unique gameplay systems and mechanics, but as it stands, it might be best to stick with a different format to experience this game.
So, What’s it Like? Ylands is like Minecraft, crossed with Dragon Quest Builders 2.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this does not influence my score.