Islanders: Console Edition (Switch) Review

When Islanders released on PC a few years ago, it felt at home there, with its minimalist design and simple controls — it arriving on Switch via the recent Indie World showcase was a welcome surprise. The question is: can the zen-inspired city builder find a quiet place to call its own, amongst the veritable deluge of Switch games?

It’s very important to understand that while this is a city building game, it isn’t actually on the same level as Sim City or City Skylines; no, this is to city building games what Go-Kart racing is to Formula One. From the moment you start the game, you are presented with choice and choice is how you progress. The first choice is which one of the two provided kits you want to build with — once you’ve chosen, you will be provided with a series of buildings to place wherever you want. If you select the option to put down a farming kit, you will be provided with field plots, maybe a mill, and as long as you have dirt, you can place farm tiles down wherever. They don’t have to connect together, nor do they have to connect to anything else, you are free to go nuts. Maybe you were given the choice to build a seaweed farm; obviously seaweed requires water, so you need to build this on the outskirts of your island. a lot of the building options use common sense, however there is another layer of consideration that you must account for.

One of the more expansive sets that you’ll have access to contains houses, and alongside these residential dwellings is an object known as the City Centre — pretty straightforward stuff, but the complexity comes in how you start placing things down. In order to move forward and make progress, you need to achieve a certain number of build points; the first in each new area only requires 20, so you should have no problem achieving that. Using the town set, placing down a house or mansion is worth one point, not a great amount and when you only get a handful, you can easily see where things might become challenging. But that is where stacking them comes into play, which is the consideration I mentioned before. Each item that you go to place has a radius around it, some like mansion and houses are quite small, others like shaman huts or towers are a lot bigger. As long as the radius overlaps, you can get a bonus. For example, if you place down your City Center building, each house you place near it gains a bonus, so your one point becomes six, but then each additional house you place down that connects to another gains you more points, so the more densely you build, the more points you earn. Don’t just assume you can keep connecting things, because some items will have negative points associated with them — for example, the Shaman hut does not like to overlap its range with a Town Center, but as the hut has a massive range, finding a place for it can be a challenge, however if you succeed, you will earn more points.

As you earn points, a gauge in the bottom left corner will fill up, once it is full another building set will unlock, giving you two more choices to pick from and then you have to consider all of the above again. As far as loops go, it is very satisfying and while your island paradise might not be massive to begin with, eventually, you will encounter larger land masses to build upon. Once you have achieved a set level of build, you can leave your island and head to another one, but be prepared, because once you leave it, you can never return. Going to a new island doesn’t change how the game plays, but you will soon begin to encounter newer options, like warehouses, parks and so on, meaning the longer you play, the more choice you will encounter.

Your building spree will eventually come to an end should you use all of your pieces but fail to fill up the gauge. If that happens, you can snap a photo or two of your island home and then begin again. As I said before, the loop is very satisfying and game lengths can be a short as a few minutes, if you get an island that offers a lot of one type of terrain that you are unable to make use of. There was one time when I went out of my way to attempt to fill my little island as much as I could, I was having a blast doing that and when I ran out of space I moved on. The problem was the island I moved to was quite small and offered very little dirt, so when I got a farming set, I wasn’t able to make use of it and thus my run was over.

If you want to build without restrictions, the game does offer a sandbox mode and while it is fun not having to worry about how to make the best use of overlaps and your limited space to achieve the next level, it feels a little hollow. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy just seeing what all the buildings look like up close and it was fun to place things together that in the normal mode would hurt my progression, but to me, it is more of a way to just see everything at once. The game does have a pretty annoying problem and that’s the controls: they’re not broken, but at the same time they are not intuitive. You use the triggers to rotate the island, the shoulder buttons rotate the item you’re placing and the left stick pans the camera. Now, that should work and in theory there are times when it is okay, but for some reason they were quite rare. If the game offered the ability to customise the controls or offered a secondary method of playing, then it might be better, but with the option provided I got frustrated more often than I would have thought possible from a game that is designed to be calm and relaxing.

Taking a look at the presentation side of things the game offers up a very minimalist art style — this is not a bad thing, in fact it is quite the opposite, with the sheer number of island permutations the game has available, I rarely saw two that made me think they were the same. The colour of the islands will help define what is available to you; if the island is green, you’re more likely to see a lot of dirt that you can build farms on, however if it’s tanner and browner in colouring, then you’re going to be looking at brickworks or masonry. What is truly amazing with the style the developers went with, is that once you know what the colouring of the ground means, you don’t have to worry about trying to remember everything — it’s so simplistic it just makes sense.

The same could be said for the audio. There are no people speaking, and the music that you do hear is very slow paced, with a clear emphasis on providing you with a sense of calm. Even the ambient noise from the island is low, letting you just enjoy what you’re doing rather than something pulling your focus away from your task. It’s a balance that a lot of games aim for but few succeed in achieving, thankfully Islanders does succeed.

Islanders: Console Edition is not a game for those seeking an epic story, intense action, or even a puzzle game where a high score is all that matters. No, what it does is offer a nice and simple game, where if you only have a few minutes to play, or an hour, you can just enjoy the game for what it is. While the controls are not the most user friendly at times, they don’t stop you from enjoying the experience in the moment and given that there is no punishment for failing, there really isn’t any reason not to give it ago.

Rating: 3.5/5