Starsand Island Reviews
As far as the core game goes, there's nothing truly terrible about Starsand Island, but there's not a lot unique either. The gameplay loop is pleasant, picking your own path is nice, and the menus were extremely helpful. It's a decent length at over 60 hours minimum – though with the slow load times and delays it can be much longer. In fact, the ubiquitous bugs and performance issues weigh the entire experience down.If you take away all the bugs, the game is reasonably fun. It's just hard to justify picking this one when there's a sandstorm of cute cosy farm sims on the eShop. Still, if the anime art style and gameplay loop grab you, I'd suggest waiting until the bugs get patched, or seeking it out on another platform.
Starsand Island is an enjoyable although not perfect addition to the cosy life sim genre. It has plenty to do and collect and its flexible building system will keep some players glued for hours. If you're a fan of cosy farming mechanics, collecting bugs and fish, and developing relationships with NPCs then there's plenty here to like. The games pretty graphics are also going to be a big draw for anime fans.
Starsand Island’s 1.0 release is a massive leap forward from its Early Access foundation. The addition of 4-player co-op, Steam Workshop mod support, rich NPC interactions, and sweeping quality of life upgrades make it one of the most versatile life sims available.
Starsand Island is a decent farming sim, however the Nintendo Switch 2 version is filled with so many bugs, it needs an industrial-grade insecticide to make it playable.
Starsand Island presents an idyllic island retreat. Its profession system provides a steady path of progression, while the highly flexible building system leaves plenty of room for experimentation in the mid to late game. However, most of its mechanics remain fairly basic, crafting becomes increasingly cumbersome later on, and NPCs lack sufficiently lively reactions. The game is constantly giving players different things to do, but few of those activities truly stand out enough to set it apart from similar titles.
Review in Chinese | Read full review
Cozy sandbox life sim experience with plenty of content on Nintendo Switch 2
Starsand Island surprised me with just how deep of a life sim it is. There are still many bugs that need to be ironed out but they didn't stop me from sinking countless hours into its delightful world as it does a lot of things exceptionally well. 🏝️
Starsand Island is a solid game worth checking out if you love relaxing farming and skill-building sim games. The story and character development aren’t terribly deep, but there’s plenty of potential for the future. Give the developers a little more time to patch things up and you’ll find Starsand Island well worth your time exploring.
Starsand Island offers a relaxing and entertaining experience by combining farming, animal husbandry, construction, crafting, and various activities. Its pleasant atmosphere, freedom of action, and wide variety of items make the game a broad and enjoyable experience for fans of life sims.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Starsand Island has an addictive farming, crafting, exploration, and relationship loop, but its Switch 2 port is plagued by poor performance, extreme pop-in, long loading times, glitches, and crashes. Wait for the patches.
Starsand Island offers a relaxing and enjoyable experience with a beautiful and charming art style inspired by the famous Ghibli style. It also features a great variety of activities, ways to travel, and exploration, giving you plenty to experience and enjoy. However, its poor technical performance is a major issue that can hurt the overall experience.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
While an undeniably cozy experience, the bugginess and less developed aspects of play also make it tough to truly love at times
Once everything is ironed out, Starsand Island has my recommendation, and I hope that will happen sooner rather than later.
If I could make one wish, it would be for Starsand Island to have spent a little more time in the oven. I was initially excited for the patches, as I really wanted to play a polished version of the game. After a few crashes forced me to replay entire days, boredom set in, and the title will have a hard time winning back my goodwill.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Starsand Island is frustrating precisely because its foundation is so promising. Its satisfying grind, interconnected progression, generous resources, and charming presentation provide the makings of a genuinely enjoyable farming RPG, but a hollow narrative, underdeveloped relationships, and an unfortunate number of bugs keep it from reaching its potential. There is enough here for dedicated farming game fans to enjoy, but at 1.0, it feels like a game that needed more time to grow into the experience it was promising to be.
Starsand Island is an accessible and engaging cozy simulator that blends familiar life‑sim elements into hours of relaxing gameplay. It embraces the fantasy of retreating to island life, where players can farm, fish, and ranch freely while cultivating meaningful relationships with residents and tourists alike.
Starsand Island goes beyond in-game grinding. Instead of prioritizing productivity, it prioritizes relaxation and the feeling of truly being submersed into a game. A game you can customize and make your own. A game you can play solo or with friends. A game that goes beyond the code, and focuses on the players and their experience.
Starsand Island is a game I am personally going to be getting lost in for the foreseeable future.
Starsand Island gets an incredibly begrudging recommendation, with a list of asterisks next to it. It’s a surprisingly fun core experience, and it implements a ton of features that I wish other life simulation games had with great-feeling gameplay. The way everything interlinks is done really well, and there’s tons to unlock. Sadly, it’s let down by the minimal content around the characters and an incredible number of bugs and other issues to the point that it feels like it should have never left early access before being dealt with. Yet despite all the problems it has, it’s just enjoyable enough in many ways to somewhat forgive the issues and keep playing for hours on end.