Starsand Island Deep Look

Starsand Island is ambitious in size and scope, but it struggles to deliver consistent frame rates, with frequent glitches and strange bugs that are both funny and questionable.

I miss the days of being a kid and having what felt like infinite time on my hands. When I could pour over hundreds of hours into my favourite games and have it not feel like a chore or a slog. Unfortunately, I am an adult now with limited time, meaning games that are over a hundred hours are just no longer in the cards for me if I want to play everything I have in my backlog. I love farming sims, and I am aware of the time sink that they can be, but after fifty hours, I am finding that Starsand Island asks way too much of its players, demanding a grind I just can’t continue to slog through.

The premise has players taking on the role of an individual who is exhausted by city life and decides to move back to their hometown of Starsand Island. However, what they come to learn is how much the island has changed since then. Players are reunited with childhood friends who later become objects of affection and are whisked away into a place where life moves at a slower pace. The problem, of course, is that the game itself takes moving slowly to a literal snail’s pace. Players are expected to work through all of the game’s various disciplines: Angler, Crafter, Explorer, Farmer, and Rancher. As the player ranks up these disciplines, more items become available at the local shops, and new skills can be unlocked to assist in daily life. However, one of the struggles is that many of the tasks are often convoluted and make it hard to understand what the game expects of the player.

Where is my front door?

A large part of Starsand Island‘s problem is how long it takes to acquire money and how much things actually cost. As players work their fields, mine for ore, and craft decor at their crafting table, much of what they create often doesn’t net enough coin. Starsand Island has milestone goals to complete, and they get crazier and more costly as the game progresses. To progress the main story, players must complete tasks from the Island Life Quest app, with lofty goals ranging from purchasing property to build an even bigger house to acquiring full-sized islands. The price points are dreadfully high, and given how slow a process it is to make money, it constantly feels like the current cost-of-living crisis — where these goals feel completely out of reach without slogging through. While players can take on requests from the islanders, even those don’t pay well enough to build up the coin needed, as items and blueprints in shops are also quite expensive.

The world is also huge, and while there is a lot to do in the game, one’s mileage varies based on the activity. Minigames, such as kite flying and target shooting, have cumbersome controls; vehicles feel like shopping carts to drive, as they are difficult to maneuver. There are so many activities, and while some of them are poorly designed, there are others that fare better, such as dungeon exploration, farming, fishing, and even building one’s farmstead. There’s a lot to manage, as the game requires players to craft makers, à la Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, for literally everything they do, but the benefit here is that multiple jobs can be queued up at one time, meaning that bulk batches of items can be made. That being said, it’s not a perfect system, as storage, especially early on in the game, can feel like it’s at a premium and one’s entire farm becomes nothing but storage boxes. Starsand Island could have streamlined so many gameplay elements, but opted not to.

I didn’t name my cat… the game named it for me.

While exploring the game’s single dungeon is interesting, the combat in Starsand Island leaves a lot to be desired. Players will need to craft slingshots, bows, and ammunition to defeat enemies. The combat is a mess as it’s stiff, inaccurate, and there’s no way to dodge oncoming attacks, meaning enemies, and particularly bosses, have the advantage. Since the player only has five hearts, they need to ensure they have healing potions, except the recipe for them comes so much later in the game than it should. While managing stamina requires food, the fact that the player needs healing potions on top of it because of these two different systems truly puts the player at a disadvantage for much of the early game. Players will also receive town requests early on from residents for items they can’t even make or acquire, which also feels baffling, as items will need specific ore for items that can’t even be found until deeper into the dungeon. It’s little things like this where Starsand Island’s gameplay balance feels more wonky than cohesive.

Starsand Island is ambitious in size and scope, but it struggles to deliver consistent frame rates, with frequent glitches and strange bugs that are both funny and questionable. The first cat the player befriends in the game is named “404,” which seems apt given the quality of the game. I haven’t had a working front door since I started the game back in August, and too many residents have tried to take photos with me and gotten stuck in the environments. My personal favourite, beyond my cat’s name, is the fact that every time it rains, there is rain in every resident’s house, which makes me wonder who fixes the roofs on Starsand Island. A lot of this is very funny, but also feels so unfortunate given the game truly needed more time in the development oven. There’s just too much in the game, but everything feels half-baked and not even remotely fun. While I did not have the chance to try the game’s multiplayer, I don’t think playing this game with a friend would have made it better. After fifty hours of play, I can confidently say that unless developer Sparkle Seed irons out some of the above issues, Starsand Island is difficult to recommend to fans of the genre.

Disclosure: This article is based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.