Islanders: New Shores Review – Review
A chill, island-themed puzzle game that builds on its predecessor.
ISLANDERS: New Shores is a follow up to a 2019 release of the same name, minus the subtitle. It’s a cozy, chill puzzle game about building up an island with cities, lighthouses, shaman huts, woodmills, and other structures in order to earn as many points as possible so that you can move on to the next island. Because there’s no in-game timer, you can take as long as you like to position each structure and object to make it fit just so and rake in the most points. The pleasant tunes and charming, minimalist presentation make for an experience that’s both easy to lose yourself in and easy to recommend as lighter but enjoyable fare.
New Shores begins with a tutorial island that provides a straightforward demonstration of the mechanics but less of the nuance, which is left up to the player to discover. Essentially, you construct buildings on an island and typically next to related structures to earn more and more points. You begin new islands by choosing from a pack of two building set cards, such as Brickmaker Pack and Seaweed Farm Pack, and sometimes a unique building for the particular type of island you’re working with. From those initial structures, you start down a path of needing to continually earn enough points through building placement to level up and earn a new card pack. Along the way–an addition to the New Shores follow-up–you can also unlock special boons that have effects such as awarding more points to your next construction act or allowing you to copy one of your buildings at the cost of a temporary penalty. Once you’ve earned enough points on a single island, you can choose to move to the next one, or stay and go for the highest score and level possible before moving on.
After choosing to advance to the next island, your overall score for the previous one is tallied up and multipliers are awarded based on elements like how many boons you activated and how few undo’s you used. From there, the cycle repeats anew as you choose from a pair of islands with their own climate and special structure. What I’ve described so far is the High Score Mode of ISLANDERS: New Shores, but there’s also a Sandbox Mode for those who want to flex their creative muscles on an island space of their own design. In Sandbox Mode, you can customize the island size, climate, shape, and more before choosing from all of the structures the game has to offer.
Playing on Switch 2, I experienced a fairly smooth performance with only some light stuttering when trying to make subtle movements in positioning my buildings. There’s also an occasional stickiness when trying to move structures around before placing them, which is frustrating given how often you’ll be making subtle movements to see how many points are awarded before ultimately choosing where to drop your houses, fields, saunas, and breweries. It does feel like a game that would benefit from the Switch 2’s mouse mode, but at the time of review this was not an option–and to clarify, New Shores is considered a Switch 1 release.
The slightly more detailed and enticing menus and buildings of New Shores made me fall a little harder for it than I did the original ISLANDERS. You still retain your overall score from island to island to shoot for a position atop the online leaderboard, and that “one more run” feeling is as strong as ever given the simple gameplay and the constant dopamine drip of numbers going up and card packs unlocking. ISLANDERS: New Shores is almost certainly going to enjoy a lengthy stay on my Switch’s home screen as a way to settle into bedtime vibes at the end of the night. It’s a fun, approachable puzzle sim that should hook fans of the original back in while also bringing even more people to these chill island settings.
