Starsand Island Review – Cosy, Bugged, and Somehow Still Charming

Starsand Island reminded me a lot of the Roblox game called Bloxburg. Not that I ever played it, of course. For knowing everything about it, I can blame my daughter; she is not a gamer at all, but she is crazy about this game, and as soon as she saw me playing Starsand Island, she fell in love with the game immediately. I cannot say I felt the same love for it, but it somehow forced me to look at a game I would never touch in my life if I'm not obliged to, with a different set of eyes, and after spending more than 20 hours with it, I can say that if anyone asks me, perhaps I wouldn't touch it again regardless, but to say I had no fun playing it would be a big fat lie, because Starsand Island crawled under my skin and made me tolerate it, and for me, that's more than enough.

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I cannot say I loved Starsand Island, but I learned to tolerate it very well.

Story

Because I played Starsand Island with my daughter almost all the time, I named the main character after her. The story begins with you returning to Starsand, your childhood island home, and after some time spent at your old house, you're reunited with Solara, a childhood friend who will act as your guide through the early hours. From there, the game starts swarming you with tutorials on how to do this and how to do that and immediately offers you a choice on which career to take and what to do to settle on the island properly. You can be an angler, crafter, explorer, farmer or rancher, and whatever you choose to do, someone will be there to show you the ropes.

Romance is a thing in Starsand Island too, even though it feels a bit off because the characters look more like children than grown-ups. You can get in a relationship with more than ten characters, but the reason I'm writing about this in the story section is because none of those relationships have a valid backstory. And not just the relationships, everything, besides the opening plot, in Starsand Island is "storyless", and this is something I really disliked about the game. Such a farming simulator and a life sim like Starsand Island is obliged to have a good story, and the lack of any is a bit disappointing, I must say.

I saw this as a problem because, especially in opening hours when you're still learning a game's ins and outs, the lack of a convenient story usually means the lack of a force that will propel you forward, and if I wasn't obliged to play the game for the sake of review, I cannot be certain I'd finish it. However, numerous activities were there to occupy my attention, and where the story fell short, the gameplay made up for it.

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The story is really weak in Starsand Island, and this might be the biggest disappointment for me.

Gameplay

The gameplay is where Starsand Island takes the wheel and grabs your attention completely. Farming, fishing, mining and crafting – everything you want to do and want to be, you can in Starsand Island. However, what I liked the most about the game is how you move through the world: skateboards, roller skates, and rideable vehicles are all available, which definitely isn't something you see often in this genre. The driving mechanics are not among the most sophisticated, but you're not expecting that from such a game either. Vehicles behave more like they are floating and not moving on the road, but they serve the purpose, and in this segment Starsand Island reminds me of Roblox the most.

Home and character decorations are the elements which the developers really nailed in Starsand Island. You have so many decorations that you can install when building your home's interior. What impressed me the most was the way the game solved crafting mechanics. For example, to craft a simple window, you'll need a frame and the glass. The frame is made from planks, and to get the planks, you'll have to get the wood first. The wood is gathered by chopping trees, and to chop the trees, you'll need an axe or saw. Everything is connected, and you'll have to take care of many things before you're able to go big on Starsand Island.

So you'll need workbenches, smithies, and many more working contraptions to make something out of raw materials. Every creation requires materials and blueprints, and also certain skills, and all that you can get, learn and do in Starsand Island. The game also made sure that you can never get lost in all that confusion because, even though overwhelmed and too robust, the UI will always lead you towards your objective, and while this could be a flaw in some games, here it is definitely an asset.

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There are so many activities in Starsand Island; if not for a very hand-holding UI, you could get lost very easily.

Version 1.0, which I played on the PS5, adds four-player online co-op, but sadly, I never tried this component of the game. The very idea is fantastic, and playing those life and farming sims is always better with friends. How it plays, though, I cannot say. I tried a couple of times to connect online, but I couldn't establish a valid connection, so I gave up.

All those nice things regarding gameplay, however, are dangerously shaken by the simple fact that Starsand Island is a seriously bugged game. So many times the textures failed to load, and I fell through the floor into an infinite drop. On some occasions, the invisible walls stopped my movement even though there was nothing in front of me. One quest was completely ruined for me because the prompt for fixing something refused to appear. At first, I thought I was missing something, but I finally figured out it wasn't me; it was a bugged quest. Luckily, even though the quest in question was the main quest, I could change something to completely avoid it. Otherwise, it would have been a game breaker.

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Bugs are very frequent in Starsand Island, even the game-breaking bugs, sadly.

Visuals, Sounds, and Performance

The anime-inspired art style makes Starsand Island a very attractive game. Colourful, warm, and detailed environments will make you feel like you jumped straight into an anime cartoon full of beautifully animated characters, and in terms of visuals, the game looks really gorgeous. Of course, the game doesn't lean towards any kind of realism, and you shouldn't expect anything of a sort here; instead, the visuals are warm and happy, and they make the game look and feel exactly as it should.

Regarding sound design, Starsand Island does exactly the same job as with visuals: it makes you feel cosy, and that's all we want from such games. As soon as you start playing, the soothing music starts playing, and it won't stop even when things are supposed to look and sound more serious. Even the dangerous music felt cosy, and this is what made a really strong impression on me.

I played the PlayStation 5 version, and even though I haven't experienced any crashes or any sort of performance hiccups, the biggest problem was the textures, which failed to load on several occasions, making the game almost unplayable. Of course, I was able to reload the last save, and everything was smooth then, but such problems need ironing out, and that is something I must point out here.

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Starsand Island is a very good-looking game.

Conclusion

I went into Starsand Island expecting nothing and came out having a really good time. This game really looks and plays like Roblox: the vehicles, the skateboarding, and the build-your-own-corner-of-the-world appeal make it easy to see why my daughter fell for it instantly.

The systems, however, are where it shines the brightest. The crafting chain alone, from tree to plank to frame to window, goes deeper than most cosy sims ever try to be, and so does the UI that keeps that complexity totally in check. But that credit comes with a cost: a game this reliant on texture loading and quest scripting cannot allow itself to have so many game-breaking bugs, and until that's fixed, I can't call it a smooth experience. Once everything is ironed out, Starsand Island has my recommendation, and I hope that will happen sooner rather than later.